POLICE Scotland is considering tackling “incel” culture as part of its strategy to address violence against women and girls.
The strategy, presented in a report at the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) policing performance committee on Thursday, includes recommendations based on engagement with the general public, women and girls, survivors of violence, key partners, academics, and experts.
The report describes incel culture as a “misogynistic ideology” in which men blame women for their lack of intimate relationships and resort to verbal, physical, or sexual assault. This culture is largely online, where incels communicate across various platforms in what is often called the “manosphere”.
READ MORE: SNP release membership figures following pressure from leadership candidates
It comes as analysis earlier this year found a six-fold rise in UK web traffic to websites promoting incel culture.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate found that UK web traffic data to three of the largest incel sites had grown from 114,420 monthly visits to 638,505, over the period of March to November 2021.
This has been accompanied by a rise in instances of sexual crime and domestic abuse according to Police Scotland, although cases often go unreported.
Although the overall number of reported sexual crimes decreased by 4.5% from 11,347 to 10,837 between April and December of last year, there was an increase of 6.6% when compared to the five-year average, with 672 more crimes reported than the previous year’s 10,164.
Proposals from the report include addressing incel culture through educational efforts, providing trauma-informed training to all members of the police force, and increasing the utilization of visually recorded interviews led by sexual offenses liaison officers.
The report said: “We will challenge these unacceptable beliefs and look to establish the scale and potential threat arising from these individuals; improve understanding amongst officers and staff of these issues and work with partners to devise appropriate awareness raising campaigns.”
READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon speaks out amid growing row over SNP leadership ballot integrity
Examples of the type of campaigns include the inclusion of incel culture and violent misogyny within existing cyber choices packages in schools, as well as higher education and workplaces.
Launching the strategy, Deputy Chief Constable Jane Connors said: “We are committed to creating a society where women and girls live free from violence, abuse, exploitation and harassment.
“We will work with our partners across criminal justice, and support services, to improve the opportunities and support for women to report [crime].
“We are committed to continually improving the service we provide, to build confidence in reporting and in policing more widely. Our service must be trauma-informed, we will prioritise the needs of victims and survivors.
“As an organisation we are not immune from the sexism and misogyny that is at the root of this violence. Our strategy recognises the work that needs to be done internally.
“Our role is crucial, but policing alone cannot stop violence against women and girls. Our strategy outlines the actions we will take as a service, together with our partners.
“We will continue to engage, to work with our partners, to improve our response and to drive the change needed to end violence against women and girls.”
The strategy will be subject to final discussion by the full SPA board next week.
So they’re going to teach kids not to be incels, and that’s pretty much it. Yeah that’ll do wonders I’m sure
Complete waste of time and money as usual. I cannot think of any more useless hysteria than people worrying about incels
Do normies and boomers even know what incels are? A socially anxious loser who lives in his mums attic, plays video games all day and has never hugged a women can somehow verbally and sexually abuse women. Lol.
These policies will do nothing but further alienate men and make them scared to even talk to women let alone approach them, unironically making more men incels.
Incels don’t just appear because it’s the hip new thing,like some kind of gang culture. it’s the result of cultural situations that are breeding them.
You cannot just say don’t be an incel and walk off patting yourself on the back.
No one WANTS to be an incel. The clue is in the damn name, INVOLUNTARY. without addressing the core issues that is causing lots of angry single men to start banding together to express rage at what they think is the reason for their suffering.
It’s not incels who are committing most violence against women, it’s much more likely to be their boyfriends and husbands. Incel violence is pretty much exclusively mass shooting style attacks which are two totally different topics
Incels are incels because they are losers, nobody wants to be one, it’s not something anyone aspires to be.
If you wanted to reduce the rising number of incels, then the focus needs to be on supporting and including outcasts and welcoming them into broader society, it’s really not difficult to understand.
The focus of this plan is all wrong.
Isn’t the whole point of incels that they don’t / can’t interact with women? What proportion of violence against women is actually perpetrated by incels or influenced by incel culture?
What they gonna do, get them all laid? This is stupid rhetoric that does nothing and helps no-one.
Incels exist because society doesn’t care about men’s mental health until it causes problems for society in general. Until we actually start caring about these people nothing will change, all the police will do is further isolate them from society.
Want to stop the movement from growing? Fix the economy.
The reason why these communities have grown is because we’ve ruined the economy. A man’s worth is judged by their wallet and social status and we’ve created a social underclass of men who cannot get good jobs, cannot make friends, cannot afford to move out of their parents’ home by their mid-twenties and have nobody to turn to because people laugh at and ridicule them, and because we’ve basically gutted out all mental healthcare programmes. This is of course a social death sentence and has basically created adult virgins.
It’s a very worrying trend in America right now, because 27% of men aged between 18 and 30 are still virgins, compared to just 8% of women.
Demonizing the movement and branding them terrorists and the next generation of school shooters isn’t helping either. Exclusion is just going to push them deeper down that rabbit-hole and radialize them even more.
Should also target the own police force for violence against women
>The strategy, presented in a report at the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) policing performance committee on Thursday, includes recommendations based on engagement with the general public, women and girls, survivors of violence, key partners, academics, and experts.
So we are going to engage everyone BUT the people who we want to stop from becoming radicalised. Going to work perfect.
We could start with things like social isolation and loneliness. There is less and less spaces for young men to spend time that don’t involve drinking alcohol. We have banned most young people from everywhere kids are harassed in parks for loitering youth clubs are non existent. Schools have many groups dedicated to other social groups such as minority clubs, women can code etc but no groups for young men.
Demonization of men in media also doesn’t help. Calls for more women only spaces implying all man are potential threat. Crazy rules we have around certain jobs such as the amount am mental gymnastics needed to put chaperones around male doctors and male nursery assistants or health care workers. As a male care worker I was forbidden from being in a room with a female patient unsupervised. My female co-worker could be in room with both male and female patients. If I can’t be trusted not to be a rapist why am I even employed?
Poor social care and mental health that don’t spot the people that need help.
Young men especially young white working class men underperform in almost every metric from health, mental health through being victims of violence and aggression to education and career prospects but we refuse to address it.
Finally our own society “small dick energy”, “angry virgin” etc are all the insults that are targeted at those young men from people who claim oppose the view that man value comes from sexual activity.
What to stop Incels and other radicalisation solve complex social and economic issues affecting those groups
Passing the blame great work police, why don’t you really look at the vast majority of men doing these crime’s.
[removed]
I don’t really get incel culture. I’m a guy who can’t get laid, with a lot of friends who constantly are, and I know a lot of guys that act awfully towards women who get laid constantly.
That doesn’t really result in me hating women because of it though, it just makes me kind of depressed lol
In response to the article though, what do the police actually intend on doing? People are going to be assholes for stupid reasons all through life, and I really doubt that incel culture is an epidemic at the moment
Police going to bang incels to destroy incel culture? That’s going to be hard work.
Oh great, I as a woman am meant to trust a rapey police force to handle online cretins who think rape is nature’s way of balancing shit
Cool. The blind leading the blind.
**I think we need to start distinguishing between the two different groups of incels or else we will keep talking past each other.** There are incels that are ‘only’ unsuccesful in dating, and these men (and also women, to a lesser extent) are all around us. I’m sure I have a roommate and at least one friend that fit into this incel ‘archetype’.
Then there are the incels that have adopted a misogynistic worldview and that actively hate women. They set ultra high standards by demanding all their dates are virgins, or say things like that women hit the wall at 23. Some are ultra-conservative and basically want a housewife and baby making machine. I would ask anyone unfamiliar with this group to visit the incel message boards, where they debate about how rape should be legal or share videos of women being beaten up for laughs, and then come back to me with the naieve mantra that these are just misunderstood boys that get mistreated by evil women.
The first group needs patience and kindness, and needs to be reintegrated into society. The economic problems that create this group need to be addressed, and we need to have honest conversations about unfair social expectations and toxic dating culture. However, I find that these men *rarely* call themselves incels because everyone knows that label has strong ideological ties. Hell, I have male friends that are unsuccesful romantically and sexually, but they don’t hate women and they don’t call themselves incels either. These are not the men this article talks about, *because they are not the incels that form violent threats to women.*
The incels that are a danger to women are members of the second group. And that group is not just going to be saved with kindness and patience. Ultimately, they are a product of societal problems just like the first group, but they have spun their misfortunes into a dangerous narrative that transcends economic hardship or unfair dating markets. We can try and fit them into society all we want but ultimately they need to work on themselves, too. We could fix economic issues and fix unfair dating culture and they would still go around calling women ‘femoids’ and spend their evenings rage-posting on forums about how seeing girls in public fills them with violent rage.
This makes no sense whatsoever. The vast majority of violence against women is by their partners, i.e. by definition not incels
Typical bullshit. We’ll tackle the problem of the growing despair felt by men. Me who feel like the worthless dregs of society. And we’ll do this by supporting everyone but those men.
I dont think this will work. Inceldom is entirely built upon being outcast from society, by acting further to isolate you villify them and strengthen the culture.
This is the wrong answer I think. Protecting their potential victims is good, but the police appears to be completely discounting men and particularly young boys as victims themselves of the symptoms that create an incel personality.
A lot of people on here are talking as if men who can’t attract a girlfriend have some kind of monopoly on misogyny.
There are plenty of men who find it very easy to attract women, but then abuse them.
Over 100 women a year die as a result of domestic abuse. That far outweighs the number of incel murders. Because most incels don’t kill anyone.
1 in 4 women will experience domestic abuse at some point in their lives. Virtually none of that will be caused by incels, because incels aren’t in relationships.
I’m not saying the police should ignore the problem, but they need to keep most of their focus on the most significant perpetrators of violence against women. And that isn’t incels.
One part of this that hasn’t been covered yet is how this may be a creeping subset of religious extremism. Andrew Tate converted to Islam and many incels turned out to be from certain groups who kind of inherently dislike womens rights. Islam is gradually gaining popularity in incel groups for obvious reasons with the phrase “Islam is right about women” being a meme in that community for while.
Best way to tackle incels is to improve the economy and change gender norms experienced by men. These men are angry because they feel society views them as worthless.
The economy is shit, girls outperform boys in school and go to higher education at greater rates, resulting them earning less. Society also views a man’s value by his wallet and this is also reflected in dating where men are more willing to date women poorer than them than the other way around.
This coupled with the inherent ease of getting sex and relationships for women due to our dating norms (man pursues, man pays for everything, man has to try to get sex from women) just increases their hatred of women.
It comes from a feeling of being left behind and jealousy.
I’m begging people on this sub to read “Men Who Hate Women” by Laura Bates, before they start making comments speculating why incel culture has emerged and grown in influence/popularity over the years.
I’m always disgusted by how much sympathy this sub has for incels. There’s a world of difference between being a guy who is single and lonely and being an incel. It’s the feeling that you are entitled to sex that is the issue.
Unless someone is actively sabotaging all your attempts to find love or forcing you to wear a chastity belt you are not involuntarily celibate. There are plenty of people out there who are willing to sleep with you, its just some of them will be women who are not conventionally attractive, other men, or people who want paid.
Reddit is infested with misogyny and more needs to be done to root it out.
My 13yr old daughter was tonight asked (by an unknown 17yr old) to finger herself and take photos, send a video masturbating, send him nudes, etc.
At 12 she has already been sent unsolicited dick pics.
I have a very bright daughter, who tells me all these things, but she’s a little too trusting, and if I want there she’d probably have believed this guy was a) 17, b) has been in care his whole life, c) is dying of cancer.
We need tougher laws on unsolicited dick pics and some way to report all these sick men who think it’s ok to chat to young girls.
Wow we really will try anything that isn’t actually investing in mental health won’t we?
28 comments
By James Walker
POLICE Scotland is considering tackling “incel” culture as part of its strategy to address violence against women and girls.
The strategy, presented in a report at the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) policing performance committee on Thursday, includes recommendations based on engagement with the general public, women and girls, survivors of violence, key partners, academics, and experts.
The report describes incel culture as a “misogynistic ideology” in which men blame women for their lack of intimate relationships and resort to verbal, physical, or sexual assault. This culture is largely online, where incels communicate across various platforms in what is often called the “manosphere”.
READ MORE: SNP release membership figures following pressure from leadership candidates
It comes as analysis earlier this year found a six-fold rise in UK web traffic to websites promoting incel culture.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate found that UK web traffic data to three of the largest incel sites had grown from 114,420 monthly visits to 638,505, over the period of March to November 2021.
This has been accompanied by a rise in instances of sexual crime and domestic abuse according to Police Scotland, although cases often go unreported.
Although the overall number of reported sexual crimes decreased by 4.5% from 11,347 to 10,837 between April and December of last year, there was an increase of 6.6% when compared to the five-year average, with 672 more crimes reported than the previous year’s 10,164.
Proposals from the report include addressing incel culture through educational efforts, providing trauma-informed training to all members of the police force, and increasing the utilization of visually recorded interviews led by sexual offenses liaison officers.
The report said: “We will challenge these unacceptable beliefs and look to establish the scale and potential threat arising from these individuals; improve understanding amongst officers and staff of these issues and work with partners to devise appropriate awareness raising campaigns.”
READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon speaks out amid growing row over SNP leadership ballot integrity
Examples of the type of campaigns include the inclusion of incel culture and violent misogyny within existing cyber choices packages in schools, as well as higher education and workplaces.
Launching the strategy, Deputy Chief Constable Jane Connors said: “We are committed to creating a society where women and girls live free from violence, abuse, exploitation and harassment.
“We will work with our partners across criminal justice, and support services, to improve the opportunities and support for women to report [crime].
“We are committed to continually improving the service we provide, to build confidence in reporting and in policing more widely. Our service must be trauma-informed, we will prioritise the needs of victims and survivors.
“As an organisation we are not immune from the sexism and misogyny that is at the root of this violence. Our strategy recognises the work that needs to be done internally.
“Our role is crucial, but policing alone cannot stop violence against women and girls. Our strategy outlines the actions we will take as a service, together with our partners.
“We will continue to engage, to work with our partners, to improve our response and to drive the change needed to end violence against women and girls.”
The strategy will be subject to final discussion by the full SPA board next week.
So they’re going to teach kids not to be incels, and that’s pretty much it. Yeah that’ll do wonders I’m sure
Complete waste of time and money as usual. I cannot think of any more useless hysteria than people worrying about incels
Do normies and boomers even know what incels are? A socially anxious loser who lives in his mums attic, plays video games all day and has never hugged a women can somehow verbally and sexually abuse women. Lol.
These policies will do nothing but further alienate men and make them scared to even talk to women let alone approach them, unironically making more men incels.
Incels don’t just appear because it’s the hip new thing,like some kind of gang culture. it’s the result of cultural situations that are breeding them.
You cannot just say don’t be an incel and walk off patting yourself on the back.
No one WANTS to be an incel. The clue is in the damn name, INVOLUNTARY. without addressing the core issues that is causing lots of angry single men to start banding together to express rage at what they think is the reason for their suffering.
It’s not incels who are committing most violence against women, it’s much more likely to be their boyfriends and husbands. Incel violence is pretty much exclusively mass shooting style attacks which are two totally different topics
Incels are incels because they are losers, nobody wants to be one, it’s not something anyone aspires to be.
If you wanted to reduce the rising number of incels, then the focus needs to be on supporting and including outcasts and welcoming them into broader society, it’s really not difficult to understand.
The focus of this plan is all wrong.
Isn’t the whole point of incels that they don’t / can’t interact with women? What proportion of violence against women is actually perpetrated by incels or influenced by incel culture?
What they gonna do, get them all laid? This is stupid rhetoric that does nothing and helps no-one.
Incels exist because society doesn’t care about men’s mental health until it causes problems for society in general. Until we actually start caring about these people nothing will change, all the police will do is further isolate them from society.
Want to stop the movement from growing? Fix the economy.
The reason why these communities have grown is because we’ve ruined the economy. A man’s worth is judged by their wallet and social status and we’ve created a social underclass of men who cannot get good jobs, cannot make friends, cannot afford to move out of their parents’ home by their mid-twenties and have nobody to turn to because people laugh at and ridicule them, and because we’ve basically gutted out all mental healthcare programmes. This is of course a social death sentence and has basically created adult virgins.
It’s a very worrying trend in America right now, because 27% of men aged between 18 and 30 are still virgins, compared to just 8% of women.
Demonizing the movement and branding them terrorists and the next generation of school shooters isn’t helping either. Exclusion is just going to push them deeper down that rabbit-hole and radialize them even more.
Should also target the own police force for violence against women
>The strategy, presented in a report at the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) policing performance committee on Thursday, includes recommendations based on engagement with the general public, women and girls, survivors of violence, key partners, academics, and experts.
So we are going to engage everyone BUT the people who we want to stop from becoming radicalised. Going to work perfect.
We could start with things like social isolation and loneliness. There is less and less spaces for young men to spend time that don’t involve drinking alcohol. We have banned most young people from everywhere kids are harassed in parks for loitering youth clubs are non existent. Schools have many groups dedicated to other social groups such as minority clubs, women can code etc but no groups for young men.
Demonization of men in media also doesn’t help. Calls for more women only spaces implying all man are potential threat. Crazy rules we have around certain jobs such as the amount am mental gymnastics needed to put chaperones around male doctors and male nursery assistants or health care workers. As a male care worker I was forbidden from being in a room with a female patient unsupervised. My female co-worker could be in room with both male and female patients. If I can’t be trusted not to be a rapist why am I even employed?
Poor social care and mental health that don’t spot the people that need help.
Young men especially young white working class men underperform in almost every metric from health, mental health through being victims of violence and aggression to education and career prospects but we refuse to address it.
Finally our own society “small dick energy”, “angry virgin” etc are all the insults that are targeted at those young men from people who claim oppose the view that man value comes from sexual activity.
What to stop Incels and other radicalisation solve complex social and economic issues affecting those groups
Passing the blame great work police, why don’t you really look at the vast majority of men doing these crime’s.
[removed]
I don’t really get incel culture. I’m a guy who can’t get laid, with a lot of friends who constantly are, and I know a lot of guys that act awfully towards women who get laid constantly.
That doesn’t really result in me hating women because of it though, it just makes me kind of depressed lol
In response to the article though, what do the police actually intend on doing? People are going to be assholes for stupid reasons all through life, and I really doubt that incel culture is an epidemic at the moment
Police going to bang incels to destroy incel culture? That’s going to be hard work.
Oh great, I as a woman am meant to trust a rapey police force to handle online cretins who think rape is nature’s way of balancing shit
Cool. The blind leading the blind.
**I think we need to start distinguishing between the two different groups of incels or else we will keep talking past each other.** There are incels that are ‘only’ unsuccesful in dating, and these men (and also women, to a lesser extent) are all around us. I’m sure I have a roommate and at least one friend that fit into this incel ‘archetype’.
Then there are the incels that have adopted a misogynistic worldview and that actively hate women. They set ultra high standards by demanding all their dates are virgins, or say things like that women hit the wall at 23. Some are ultra-conservative and basically want a housewife and baby making machine. I would ask anyone unfamiliar with this group to visit the incel message boards, where they debate about how rape should be legal or share videos of women being beaten up for laughs, and then come back to me with the naieve mantra that these are just misunderstood boys that get mistreated by evil women.
The first group needs patience and kindness, and needs to be reintegrated into society. The economic problems that create this group need to be addressed, and we need to have honest conversations about unfair social expectations and toxic dating culture. However, I find that these men *rarely* call themselves incels because everyone knows that label has strong ideological ties. Hell, I have male friends that are unsuccesful romantically and sexually, but they don’t hate women and they don’t call themselves incels either. These are not the men this article talks about, *because they are not the incels that form violent threats to women.*
The incels that are a danger to women are members of the second group. And that group is not just going to be saved with kindness and patience. Ultimately, they are a product of societal problems just like the first group, but they have spun their misfortunes into a dangerous narrative that transcends economic hardship or unfair dating markets. We can try and fit them into society all we want but ultimately they need to work on themselves, too. We could fix economic issues and fix unfair dating culture and they would still go around calling women ‘femoids’ and spend their evenings rage-posting on forums about how seeing girls in public fills them with violent rage.
This makes no sense whatsoever. The vast majority of violence against women is by their partners, i.e. by definition not incels
Typical bullshit. We’ll tackle the problem of the growing despair felt by men. Me who feel like the worthless dregs of society. And we’ll do this by supporting everyone but those men.
I dont think this will work. Inceldom is entirely built upon being outcast from society, by acting further to isolate you villify them and strengthen the culture.
This is the wrong answer I think. Protecting their potential victims is good, but the police appears to be completely discounting men and particularly young boys as victims themselves of the symptoms that create an incel personality.
A lot of people on here are talking as if men who can’t attract a girlfriend have some kind of monopoly on misogyny.
There are plenty of men who find it very easy to attract women, but then abuse them.
Over 100 women a year die as a result of domestic abuse. That far outweighs the number of incel murders. Because most incels don’t kill anyone.
1 in 4 women will experience domestic abuse at some point in their lives. Virtually none of that will be caused by incels, because incels aren’t in relationships.
I’m not saying the police should ignore the problem, but they need to keep most of their focus on the most significant perpetrators of violence against women. And that isn’t incels.
One part of this that hasn’t been covered yet is how this may be a creeping subset of religious extremism. Andrew Tate converted to Islam and many incels turned out to be from certain groups who kind of inherently dislike womens rights. Islam is gradually gaining popularity in incel groups for obvious reasons with the phrase “Islam is right about women” being a meme in that community for while.
Best way to tackle incels is to improve the economy and change gender norms experienced by men. These men are angry because they feel society views them as worthless.
The economy is shit, girls outperform boys in school and go to higher education at greater rates, resulting them earning less. Society also views a man’s value by his wallet and this is also reflected in dating where men are more willing to date women poorer than them than the other way around.
This coupled with the inherent ease of getting sex and relationships for women due to our dating norms (man pursues, man pays for everything, man has to try to get sex from women) just increases their hatred of women.
It comes from a feeling of being left behind and jealousy.
I’m begging people on this sub to read “Men Who Hate Women” by Laura Bates, before they start making comments speculating why incel culture has emerged and grown in influence/popularity over the years.
I’m always disgusted by how much sympathy this sub has for incels. There’s a world of difference between being a guy who is single and lonely and being an incel. It’s the feeling that you are entitled to sex that is the issue.
Unless someone is actively sabotaging all your attempts to find love or forcing you to wear a chastity belt you are not involuntarily celibate. There are plenty of people out there who are willing to sleep with you, its just some of them will be women who are not conventionally attractive, other men, or people who want paid.
Reddit is infested with misogyny and more needs to be done to root it out.
My 13yr old daughter was tonight asked (by an unknown 17yr old) to finger herself and take photos, send a video masturbating, send him nudes, etc.
At 12 she has already been sent unsolicited dick pics.
I have a very bright daughter, who tells me all these things, but she’s a little too trusting, and if I want there she’d probably have believed this guy was a) 17, b) has been in care his whole life, c) is dying of cancer.
We need tougher laws on unsolicited dick pics and some way to report all these sick men who think it’s ok to chat to young girls.
Wow we really will try anything that isn’t actually investing in mental health won’t we?