A new study reveals the disturbing scale of gender-based violent extremism festering in online spaces like 4chan, where Australian and New Zealand users promote misogyny and sexual violence as tools of ideological control. These digital subcultures are not isolated—they reflect a broader and growing security threat that demands urgent attention.
4chan is well known to be a murky part of the internet. White supremacists, neo-Nazis, nationalists, right wing terrorists like Brenton Tarrant, and other types of extremists are all known to lurk in its depths. Derogatory posts about religious and ethnic minorities are common, feminism is derided, and the political left is ridiculed. There, posters imagine acts of violence against their enemies—especially women.
Our purpose was to better understand the way women were discussed on 4chan, looking only at Australian and New Zealand posters. We whittled 135 million 4chan posts down to just 5 million—6 million from Australia and 1 million from New Zealand. Of that number, 300,000 posts from 2016-2019 focus on women and sexual violence.
We quickly found ourselves mired in offensive, racist, and misogynistic content which legitimised violence—especially sexual violence—against women. This provided us with a data-driven lens to better understand gender-based extremism in the region.
A rising threat
Australia’s updated Counter-Terrorism and Violent Extremism Strategy identifies religiously and ideologically-motivated violent extremism, digital technologies, and mixed ideologies among the current, emerging, and enduring threats. New Zealand’s strategy similarly signals religious and identity extremism, particularly white supremacy, as the two most prolific forms of violent extremism.
While both assessments are accurate, gender-based violent extremism is also part of this threat. The misogyny plaguing both nations, as well as high-profile incidences, have dominated media headlines. For instance, while the motivations of the Bondi Junction attacker who targeted women remains ambiguous, online, Incels were quick to claim and celebrate the attack.
In line with a chorus of research from Australia and New Zealand, we argue that approaches to combatting violent extremism must recognise gender-based extremism as an enduring threat to our security landscapes.
Our recent study shows the confronting breadth of gender-based extremism, fuelled by vial misogynistic and racist attitudes, in online subcultures across Australia and New Zealand.
Our findings are disturbing: Australian’s and New Zealanders endorse “traditional” gender and conjugal orders that privilege heterosexuality, condone rape within marriage, and punitively enforce women’s roles as mothers, homemakers, and virgins. Sexual and gender-based violence is promoted as a tool to remedy men’s perceived victimhood, to enforce women’s compliance with strict gendered expectations of the “good” woman, and at an existential level, to save the “white race,” which they imagine to be in deadly peril.
The existential crisis
We found that 4chan posters in our dataset were entangled in what appeared to be an ongoing existential crisis. They believed that they, as part of a privileged in-group, were under threat from a malevolently imagined out-group. This in-group was constructed as ideologically conforming (that is to say, right wing), ethnically compatible (white), and in need of salvation. The out-group was constructed as immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities, and white men and women with different sexual or moral values.
On this strange battlefield, we find their discussions on women and sexual and gender-based violence. Racial salvation, we found, was anchored in the control of women and their bodies to serve ideological ambitions.
The good wife
Australian and New Zealand 4channers construct “good” and “bad” masculine and feminine gender identities, or “gender representations” that are either part of the in-group or out-group—a phenomenon observed elsewhere.
These gender representations characterise a gender and conjugal order (regulated and policed gendered and sexual behaviour) which advance the objectives of the violent extremist, in this case, of white supremacists.
“Good” men and women whose behaviours are deemed to be “correct” help save the in-group, while “bad” men and women form the out-group and cause crisis. Thus, while performing gender “correctly” guarantees salvation, transgressing your gender legitimises violent punishment.
These discussions demonstrate a gender hierarchy. Though women are portrayed as subordinate to men, they are also—paradoxically—framed as having too much agency. Female agency (often connected with feminism) is seen to be oppressing and as subordinating white men. The posters suggest that white men need to be restored to their prior positions of power and dominance. Oppressed or subordinated men are pushed to “uncuck” themselves in order to save Western civilisation.
How do you save a civilisation? 4channers would tell you that traditional marriage is the answer, and with it, the production of white babies and a commitment to this conjugal order. Posters take explicitly violent stances, advocating for the use of sexual violence to ensure women fulfil their roles as mothers and wives, and criminalising divorce.
They see marriage as a way to guarantee men’s access to women’s bodies, and a way to assert their control over their racial futures. Hence, the hegemonic masculine ideal conceptualised by 4channers portrays the control and ownership of women as a sign of power and male ascendency, and the primary pathway to racial salvation.
The deviant wife
While one would assume that white women form the in-group, it is notable that white women are often depicted as promiscuous traitors and race-mixers who compromise their white purity and desecrate the authority and property assured to white men.
In such a way, white women are seen as enemies, and responsible for the breakdown of the conjugal order that has supposedly destabilised society.
Men and women who threaten this conjugal order become legitimised targets of violence. This violence is gendered because it is a form of retribution, performed to punish, to restore power, and to enforce gendered behaviours.
Sexual and gender-based violence is framed as a solution to punish these women and enforce their conformity to “correct” gender roles as pure and submissive mothers, wives, and homemakers. In this light, sexual and gender-based violence is thus the performance of masculinity as well as the enforcement of (“proper”) femininity.
The hard truth
Not all 4chan/pol/ users go on to conduct a terrorist attack. However, our data set has exposed at least 300,000 posts specifically conversing in vile discussions around women and sexual violence over three years. Sexual and gender-based violence is legitimised by these Australian and New Zealand posters, and glorified.
Given the relatively small populations of Australia and New Zealand, the quantity of posts—in addition to the violence-endorsing content—raises a red flag. While it may be comforting to regard these discussions as siloed to the darkest corners of the web, the hard truth is that we cannot divorce these attitudes from the broader socio-political context they are produced within.
These are not just a few bad apples—Australia and New Zealand have a problem with gender-based violent extremism. Our study exposed its online presence, but it may be that the scale of misogynistic extreme right ideology is indicative of a bigger problem.
With 4channers celebrating and promoting sexual violence and gender-based violence within and beyond intimate relationships, and operationalising it as a mechanism for extreme ideological ambitions, it is unlikely to remain only an online phenomenon—if it ever was to begin with.
Dr Kiriloi M. Ingram is a Lecturer in International Relations at the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland.
Dr Kristy Campion is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security, Charles Sturt University.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
