Terrorism is often seen as a special category of crime. But in her new book "Homegrown: How Domestic Violence turns Men into Terrorists" (Quercus), journalist and human rights campaigner Joan Smith argues for a radical shift in perspective. The book traces an extraordinary link between recent violent incidents: the fact that domestic abuse often comes before a public attack. Looking at both Islamist and far right terror attacks, Smith finds that misogyny, trauma and abuse often lurk beneath the justifications of religion or politics. Here, she discusses her arguments.
What drew you to this subject matter?
A few years ago, I started to notice how often domestic violence features in mass shootings in the US. It often turns out that the perpetrator had a history of abusing women - wives, partners, ex-girlfriends, mothers - and a female relative frequently appeared among the victims.
The Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012, which led to the deaths of 20 primary school children and six teachers, actually began with the murder of the perpetrator's mother. An attack on a church in Texas in 2017, which killed 26 people, was carried out by a man with convictions for domestic abuse who was trying to murder his mother-in-law. A few days later, a man fatally shot his wife before rushing outside and killing four more people in California. There are many more examples and there's research to back it up, showing that family members were victims in almost 60 per cent of mass shootings in the US over a five-year period.
Around 2016, I began to notice the same pattern among terrorists. The man who drove a lorry into pedestrians in Nice on the evening of Bastille Day, killing 86 people, had a horrendous history of abusing his wife (who had left him), his children and mother-in-law. The following year, all the fatal terrorist attacks in London and Manchester were carried out by men who had abused women and girls.
It applied to both the Islamist attacks and the one carried out against worshippers leaving a mosque in north London, who was a right-wing extremist. I thought they had more in common than they realised - they were violent men who practised at home before escalating onto a public stage.
How did you choose which cases to focus on, and what was your research process?
Since 2013, I've chaired the Mayor of London's Violence Against Women and Girls Board at City Hall. Shortly after the 2017 attacks, in a meeting with one of the country's most senior police officers, I asked whether he'd noticed how many terrorists have a history of domestic abuse. He hadn't - and when he returned to Scotland Yard and asked what data they had, there wasn't any. "Intellectually, we're sure you're right, but we don't have the data," he told me.
Domestic abuse didn't appear in the interim report on the 2017 attacks in the UK, summarising what MI5 knew about the perpetrators and what they had in common with hundreds of convicted terrorists. I couldn't find any academic research either, so I decided I would have to do it myself, using published sources.
I scoured reports of terrorist attacks in the UK, the US, France, Belgium, Spain, Germany and Australia, looking for information about the perpetrators' backgrounds. Some were abusers themselves, including the most extreme acts of violence - a man who took hostages in a coffee shop in Sydney in 2014, claiming to be an agent of Islamic State, was facing trial for organising the brutal murder of his ex-wife. He had also been charged with 40 counts of rape and sexual assault.
The Westminster Bridge and Finsbury Park terrorists, while ideologically opposed, both had long criminal records for violence and a history of abusing their partners. Other perpetrators I researched had been assaulted as children or witnessed attacks on their mothers and sisters, growing up to embrace violence themselves.
In what ways is domestic abuse downplayed or minimised?
Official figures suggest that 1.2m women are subjected to domestic abuse every year in England and Wales. It accounts for almost a third of violent crimes recorded by the police nationally, yet half of 999 calls to domestic incidents don't produce an arrest, let alone a conviction.
A chronic shortage of refuge spaces - in itself evidence of where victims of domestic violence stand in the government's priorities - means that many women are still living with their abusers, making it hard for them to give evidence in court. Women who took part in sanctuary schemes (a safe room room in the home where they could hide from a violent ex-partner) found they were required to pay the 'bedroom tax', as though staying safe was some kind of luxury.
Coercive control became a criminal offence at the end of 2015 but there have been few convictions. The police can remove an offender from the home, using domestic violence protection orders, but they're not being used anything like as often as they should be. It's symptomatic of a persistent failure to grasp the scale and impact of the problem, or provide the resources needed to help victims.
In what ways does domestic abuse lead to terrorism?
Obviously we are talking about a small minority, given that most abusive men don't become terrorists. But men who habitually abuse women have a lower threshold for violence. They live with it every day, enjoying the feeling of power and control that comes with it. They are desensitised, accustomed to being around distressed people, and other people's pain and fear makes them feel important.
These men have different attitudes to violence - a predisposition that makes them more susceptible to extremist propaganda. They're also imbued with misogyny, which terrorist organisations understand and exploit. Some foreign fighters have admitted that they joined ISIS to have sex slaves, the most extreme form of domestic abuse it's possible to imagine.
You talk about many terrorists experiencing domestic abuse in childhood. What makes some survivors of adverse child experiences go onto commit acts of violence and not others?
Many organisations, including the police, are much more aware than they used to be of the impact of adverse childhood experiences. Domestic abuse, loss of a parent through death or imprisonment, having a parent with substance abuse - a combination of these and other factors is known to have adverse effects on some children. All of this is known and I argue that early intervention is vital, particularly when children show signs of abuse or ask for help.
Some boys become hyper-vigilant, feeling constantly under threat, and they're susceptible to grooming by older boys and adults with malign intentions. It isn't inevitable - a boy with a violent father may have a trusted adult in his life, a family member or a teacher, who counters the impact of the abuser. But there's a chapter in my book about boys - and a tragic case of two sisters - who experienced abuse in childhood and turned to terrorism when they were older.
What role does extremist ideology play?
I think we have this the wrong way round, assuming that terrorist organisations turn perfectly ordinary men towards violence. What I'm suggesting is that most of them are already violent and extremist ideology offers a spurious justification, encouraging them to think of themselves as warriors in some sort of cause.
One of the central arguments of the book is that domestic violence is creating a pool of volatile, angry men who are susceptible to very nasty propaganda - it tells them what they want to hear. Particularly when, as is the case with a number of perpetrators in the book, they've finally been thrown out of the family home and have lost access to the primary victim.
How could we meaningfully address this link between domestic abuse and terrorism? What kinds of legal or societal changes would help?
Terrorism is almost always male violence but it's usually seen through an entirely different prism, that of ideology. I want to change that because something important is being missed here - male violence doesn't stay in neat categories. Terrorists are first and foremost violent men, and they're more susceptible to extremist ideas than the rest of us.
In the UK, counter-terrorism police and MI5 have a list of around 25,00 terrorist suspects, 3,000 of them high-risk and the rest individuals who might pose a threat. Those with a history of domestic violence have already crossed a threshold, so they're the ones to concentrate on. It's a simple idea that might save lives.
