These crimes often seek to intimidate and suppress ways of life or expressions of identity that are perceived as not complying with traditional gender norms. The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) describes gender-based hate crimes as criminal offences motivated by bias against a person’s gender. The incel ideology advocates violence and bloodshed, frequently in the form of gender-based hate crimes, as a way to intimidate the broader society and women in particular. This rapidly growing online community is primarily composed of young men who are angry and extremely frustrated by their inability to find sexual partners. Rodger is one of the more well-known idols of the incel movement, short for ‘involuntarily celibate,’ a violent political ideology based on aggressive misogyny. These similarities are frequently based around the desire to restore ‘traditional’ gender norms of male dominance, and often manifest in gender-based hate crimes before escalating into community violence and armed conflict. Around that same time, non-State armed groups on the other side of the globe were reportedly using female sex slaves as part of their recruitment efforts.*Īt first glance, Rodger’s attack on women at a California sorority and armed groups giving sex slaves to recruits and fighters may not seem to be directly linked, but the spectrum of misogynistic violence between lone shooters and armed groups using extreme violence or engaged in armed conflict has many troubling commonalities. In 2014, 22 year-old Elliott Rodger went on a murderous spree near Santa Barbara, California, targeting women in a sorority ‘to exact revenge on the society’ that had ‘denied’ him sex and love. Gender-based hate crime as an early warning indicator of escalating violence and armed conflict.