Why men who murder women should be called TERRORISTS - and what I learned going undercover on incel forums where male virgins are radicalised into violence

When is a terror attack not a terror attack? When the victims are women.

It would be hard not to draw this conclusion after recent horrific events in Sydney, Australia.

On April 13, Joel Cauchi killed six people and stabbed 12 more, including a nine-month-old baby girl inside the Westfield Bondi Junction shopping centre. The vast majority of the victims were women. This was no coincidence, as we would quickly learn.

Joel Cauchi, 40, murdered six people - five of them women - in Westfield Junction shopping centre in Sydney. Several others, including a baby girl, were injured

New South Wales police commissioner Karen Webb said: 'It's obvious to me and it's obvious to detectives that it seems to be an area of interest that the offender had focused on women and avoided the men.'

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese followed with an understatement Australian women could be forgiven for finding deeply insulting: 'The gender breakdown is, of course, concerning.'

The attacker's father Andrew Cauchi even admitted his son may have targeted women was because 'he wanted a girlfriend... He's got no social skills and he was frustrated out of his brain.'

In spite of these clear acknowledgements, police immediately ruled out any connection to terrorism, saying: 'No information we have received, no evidence we've recovered, no intelligence that we have gathered... would suggest that this was driven by any particular motivation, ideology or otherwise.'

Artist Pikria Darchia, 55, was fatally stabbed, along with four other women, by Joel Cauchi at a Sydney shopping mall in April

Jade Young was another of the victims. She was stabbed to death aged 47 at Westfield Bondi Junction

Yet, just two days later, a 16-year-old boy stabbed clergy members and members of the congregation at a Sydney church. The very next day, police declared it a 'terrorist act' - defined by Australian police as an 'ideologically motivated' offence - with Albanese boldly speaking out against 'violent extremism' in the country.

What must be concluded from this?

That deliberately killing women is not considered ideological or extremist. Tell that to the one in three women on the planet who are raped or beaten in their lifetime. That statistic is not random chance.

Ideology is defined as a set of ideas or beliefs of a group or an individual. What is misogyny, then, if not an ideology? A belief system that has dominated patriarchal societies for thousands of years.

Of course, the two cases were different. Both will have their own complexities and investigations are ongoing. I'm not suggesting they should be treated identically. I'm not even suggesting that the Bondi Junction attack should have been immediately declared a terrorist attack. But I firmly believe the possibility should not have been so quickly and dismissively ruled out.

By doing so, the authorities implied that the apparently deliberate targeting of women with fatal violence could not possibly be related to any 'ideology'.

Sydney locals and friends of the victims gather at a makeshift memorial outside the shopping centre

Yixuan Cheng was the last victim to be identified - she was a 27-year-old economics student from China, studying a masters degree at the University of Sydney

This problem isn't unique to Australia. It's a much wider societal oversight. When women are murdered by men because they are women, we do not consider it to be a form of terrorism. But we have no trouble quickly attaching that label to other kinds of ideologically-motivated attacks (particularly those not carried out by white men).

You might wonder if the label really matters. But the designation has a massive impact. It sends the message that this is something those in power care about enough to label it high priority. That they see it as serious.

Mass murders of women by men who have made misogynistic statements or been involved in extreme misogynistic communities online are far from rare. But you probably haven't heard of most of them because motive is rarely mentioned. The perpetrators are not described as terrorists. The word extremism doesn't come up.

In 2014, Elliot Rodger murdered six people and injured 14 others in Santa Barbara, California. In a sickening manifesto, he wrote: 'I will destroy all women... I will attack the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender.'

As part of the killing spree, he targeted the Alpha Phi sorority (a female society at a university) whose members he deemed the 'hottest' at his college, 'the kind of girls I've always desired but never been able to have'.

But police didn't designate it an extremist attack. Instead, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff described the shootings as 'the work of a madman', calling Rodger 'severely mentally disturbed'. Local media headlines didn't mention the misogynistic nature of the attack.

Dawn Singleton, 25. Her police officer fiance rushed to the scene to help colleagues only to be told his wife-to-be was one of the victims

Ashlee Good, 38, died in the attack. Her nine-month-old daughter was also targeted and sustained life-threatening injuries

Rodger had been heavily involved in so-called 'incel' websites and forums: where men who consider themselves 'involuntarily celibate' blame women for denying them sex, and plot their 'revenge' in the form of physical and sexual violence.

In 2021, Jake Davison carried out the first mass-shooting Britain had seen in a decade, killing five people and injuring two others in Plymouth, Devon.

Within 24 hours, police said they did not consider it a terrorist attack or linked to extremism.

This is despite Davison being active in incel forums, uploading misogynistic rants about women online. His mother had previously reported him to the Prevent anti-terror scheme.

Days before the shooting, he'd searched online for incel serial killers.

Remember the van attack of 2018 in Toronto, Canada, when a van was driven at pedestrians, killing ten people and injuring 16 others? Even if you heard about the attack, you're unlikely to know that the majority of victims were women, or that perpetrator Alek Minassian told police he had been radicalised online and was acting in the name of 'incel ideology'.

'I was angry that [women] would give their love and affection to obnoxious brutes,' he said.

New South Wales Commissioner Karen Webb said: 'It's obvious to me... that it seems to be an area of interest that the offender had focused on women and avoided the men'

Minutes before he launched his deadly attack, he posted on Facebook: 'The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys [names incels use to describe attractive men and women]! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!'

Yet, authorities told the media: 'The driver's actions... appeared intentional, but did not seem to have been an act of terrorism.'

'The city is safe', declared the Toronto police chief. But how can a city be safe when its women are not?

These are a handful of the countless examples.

In such cases, killers are usually described as 'lone wolves', 'disturbed' and 'mentally ill'. There may well be components of mental illness in many such cases, but it is wrong and damaging to suggest that this is the sole issue. Mental illness is rarely mentioned when discussing acts of Islamist terrorism, for example, even when it is present.

Millions of people globally experience mental illness without committing acts of violence. And though mental illness might make someone particularly vulnerable to malicious ideologies such as misogynistic extremism, it doesn't mean we should ignore the role those ideologies play in events.

Yes, we need to talk about treatment and support for mental illness, but we also need to reflect on the underlying societal issues that result in some 96 per cent of mass murderers being men. We also need to confront the fact that around a hundred people in the past decade alone have been killed or seriously injured by men who have been influenced by extremist misogyny.

We need to recognise hatred of women as a serious social problem and describe massacres found to have been explicitly carried out in its name as 'terrorism'.

The label is important because it gives investigators extra powers and makes specific actions available to them. It releases particular funds and enables officers to draw on special experts and influences the political action taken as a result.

Last week in Australia, the Premier of New South Wales, Chris Minns, announced a coronial inquest and government review to consider whether the Bondi Junction attack demonstrated a need to strengthen mental health support. He also ordered a review of the powers held by security guards. But he didn't announce any investigation or action to be taken on misogyny and male violence against women. If the possibility of this being a misogynistic terror attack had remained on the table, that might have been different.

Joel Cauchi in a photo from his school yearbook. The vast majority of the victims were women

The family of Faraz Tahir, who was the only man killed. He was a security guard at the mall and tried to intervene in the attack

How we describe and respond to tragic events like this matters. It reinforces that we consider it unacceptable in our society.

But, of course, that's part of the problem. Sexism and misogyny aren't unacceptable, or even unusual. Men murdering women is nothing new. It happens all the time. Once every three days, on average, in the UK alone. How can we recognise misogyny as a form of extremism when it is all around us, all the time?

When writing my book, Men Who Hate Women, which explores misogynistic online communities and their offline impact, I spent months undercover on incel forums. This week, I returned there to see the response to news of the Bondi Junction attack. Here are some direct quotes from forum users. No doubt some readers may find them distressing - but they are important to acknowledge if we want to fully confront the dangers women face.

'So happy to know that he is incel motivated... as good as a sushi chef slicing down sushi rolls,' one user wrote.

'Men need women, if enough men don't have access to females they gonna show their anger in another form,' another said.

'He scored a pretty good blow with killing that Stacy... I can't even feel bad she died.'

And finally: 'Just watching and enjoying personally.'

Until we recognise the role of online extremism in mainstreaming misogyny, forums like this will continue to thrive. Vulnerable men will continue to be radicalised. And unless we realise that deliberately targeting women with violence is an act of terror and take action to prevent it, attacks like this will keep happening.