West Aussies are still coming to grips with a knife attack on the weekend by a teenager police described as “radicalised”.
One man was hospitalised after being stabbed in the back by the 16-year-old Rossmoyne Senior High School boy, who was then tasered and shot dead by police in the car park of Bunnings at Willetton.
It’s the sort of violence that is not uncommon around the world, but here in WA we have been lulled into a false sense of security.
That stuff just doesn’t happen here, right?
But it did, just as it did last month when another 16-year-old boy stabbed Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at the Christ the Good Shepherd Church in the western Sydney suburb of Wakeley.
In both instances, it appears as though these boys were exposed to Islamic extremism online.
Authorities in Perth even knew about it in advance and had tried to divert the Rossmoyne student by enrolling him in an anti-radicalisation program.
FYI, that program is based on the research of counter-terrorism expert Anne Aly, who left the halls of academia to become Federal Youth Minister in the Albanese Government.
After the Willetton knife attack, WA Police Commissioner Col Blanch praised the Muslim community for having “the courage to respond and express their concerns that this person was exhibiting concerning behaviours”.
Those concerns were expressed to police after members of that community spotted alarming things the boy had posted online.
While we all hope this an isolated incident, the fact is radicalisation is happening all the time in WA and it often has violent and tragic outcomes.
You just don’t realise it because we’re not talking about headline-grabbing terrorism or Islamic extremism.
The insidious radicalisation of boys and young men into becoming misogynists is far more common and it’s happening in our homes as you read this.
Recently I had leading men’s health researcher and clinical psychologist Dr Zac Seidler on my Nightly Five podcast to discuss Australia’s DV crisis.
The point he made was that no eight-year-old boy imagines he’s going to grow up and hurt the women in his life.
Something has to happen to that child — mistreatment, trauma and, all too often, exposure to vile misogyny on the internet and social media.
Researchers such as political sociologist Dr Joshua Roose who specialise in this field speak about something called “ideological masculinity”, which uses the fictional concept of male victimhood to promote the subordination of women.
At its most extreme it manifests as the incel (involuntary celibate) movement and social media is awash in this garbage.
The process of radicalisation to this cause is exactly the same as it is for Islamic extremism, but the difference is it’s more prevalent, so there’s a much greater chance your kids are already exposed to it.
The Willetton incident is terrifying, no doubt about that. But the number of women who have been killed this year at the hands of men in their lives is every bit as horrifying.