Almost 40% of Australian teenage boys support “right-wing violent extremism” and one-third support “White supremacist violent extremism”, new University of Melbourne research shows.
Lead researcher Dr Sara Meger, a senior lecturer in international relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences, surveyed 1,100 boys and girls aged 13 to 17, and 2,300 adult men and women, including 14 who claimed to be “non-binary”, The Advertiser reported.
Respondents were asked if they agreed or disagreed with a range of statements, including “society demonises Whiteness today, so violent resistance is the only way for White people to have a fair chance in the world”, to determine whether they supported different types of so-called violent extremism.
A quarter of boys supported every form of violent extremism identified in the survey, 39% supported “right-wing” types, followed by “White supremacist” on 29.7%, “anti-feminist” on 28.6%, “left-wing” on 28.5%, “incel” on 25.5%, “religious-based” on 21.1%.
For girls, 17% supported all forms of violent extremism listed, including 30.4% for right-wing, 21.6% for left-wing, 21.1% for anti-feminist, 19.3% for White supremacist, 17.5% for incel, and 13.9% for religious-based.
The research found that almost 24% of the 661 teenage boys surveyed exhibited radicalising intent, 18% sympathised with radical violence, and 10.4% harboured violent intent.
36.3% agreed with “misogynistic attitudes”, 40.5% mistrusted women, 29% minimised violence against women, 20.7% excused the behaviour of those who use violence against women, and 20% disagreed with the concept of “affirmative consent”.
Dr Meger said her research showed “strong” and “significant” correlations between anti-feminist views and support for violent extremism, and described the proportion of boys who held both “violent extremist” and misogynist views “disturbingly high”.
“It’s worse than I expected. The results of our survey are pretty harrowing and I think they show a real societal problem,” she said.
“People are just frustrated, they’re aggrieved. They want radical change but they don’t have a coherent ideology of what the source of the problem is and what the solution is. Resistance to feminism is what they all agree on.
“Both boys and girls are getting a very, consistently strong anti-feminism message … [girls] are subjected to almost as much misogynistic content online [as boys] and have also received a societal-wide message that feminism has gone far enough and maybe even too far.”
Other questions asked in the survey included “it’s okay to use violence to get what you want”, “women use their sexuality to manipulate men”, “sometimes a woman can make a man so angry that he hits her when he didn’t mean to”, “there is nothing wrong with a guy pretending to like a girl online so that he can convince her to send him nude pictures”, “women often make sexual assault accusations as a way of getting back at men”, and “our government is full of weak men who have allowed feminism to go too far. This is why we must take matters into our own hands to stop the spread of feminism and gender ideology”.
Header image: The University of Melbourne (Polly clip – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link).
