Why men who murder women should be called TERRORISTS - and what I learned going ... trends now
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
