When misogyny festers, extremism follows: Lisa MacLeod and Joe Varner in National Newswatch

One of the enduring failures of modern security and counterterrorism thinking is that we fixate on online manifestos, foreign radicalisers and ideological “dog-whistles,” yet we often ignore the bruises, the restraining orders, and the abuse happening in our own homes and communities. When a terrorist attack hits, the news cycle rushes to the attacker’s professed creed, their political grievance, the manifesto they signed online. Rarely does it pause to ask whether the seeds of violence were planted much earlier — in a kitchen, a driveway, a bedroom — when a woman was battered, silenced, or controlled.

In reviewing Islamist-inspired violent actors, a chilling pattern emerges: many on investigation had prior histories of abusing women. That abusive behaviour is not incidental or merely associative — it appears to be the training ground for much larger atrocities. One US study revealed that in 68.2 per cent of mass shootings between 2014 and 2019 the perpetrator killed a partner or family member or had a history of domestic violence.

In the case of the Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, for example, four years before the attack he was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend (the charges were later dismissed). In Florida, Omar Mateen pled allegiance to ISIS while gunning down LGBTQ club-goers — yet his first wife publicly said he beat and isolated her, holding her captive until her family rescued her; his second wife was described in court as living in fear under repeated abuse.

In Europe the patterns repeat: Mohamed Lahouaiej‑Bouhlel (the Nice truck attacker) had several reported domestic-violence incidents — including urinating on his wife, defecating in their bedroom and stabbing a toy — mere weeks before he drove a truck into families on the Promenade des Anglais. Khalid Masood (the Westminster Bridge attacker) had a documented history of abusing female partners. In a recent example, Jihad Al-Shamie was reportedly charged with rape and on bail when he carried out the fatal knife and car attack on a Manchester synagogue. These militants did not discover brutality in an online forum: they honed it at home and on the street against women who knew them. These are a few but important examples of an under investigated trend in radicalization on the way to terrorism.

Why does this matter? Because democracies often draw a sharp line between intimate-partner violence and terrorism — local police handle domestic violence, national counter-terror agencies handle jihadist threats — when in fact they are connected. A man who learns from his earliest intimate relationships that a woman is his to dominate internalises a worldview: that violence is legitimate, consent irrelevant. That worldview can then be radicalised. When Islamist terrorist organisations treat women as property — institutionalising sexual slavery (as with ISIS), forced marriages and rape (as with Boko Haram) — they teach men the same lesson: obey or be punished; submit or be erased. Honour killings, stonings, and death for women who dare to seek education, choose their own clothing, or speak to a man outside of wedlock — these are not cultural oddities or benign tradition. They are tools of war. They are methods of control and terror.

For Canada, the United States and Europe, this is a serious blind-spot. And yet, our threat-assessment systems rarely treat domestic-violence records as behavioural trip-wires for Islamist-inspired terrorism.

What must we do?

First: integrate gender-based violence into all behavioural threat-assessment systems. If an individual under counter-terrorism surveillance has a past of domestic battery, stalking, sexual coercion, or dehumanising women — these are risk-multipliers and must trigger elevated review. Prompting a restraining order or shelter referral is not enough: we must ask whether this person is harbouring the same mindset that leads to ideological murder.

Second: break the silos between institutions that treat “family violence” as one domain and “terrorism” as another. Local police, courts, shelters, and child-protection agencies must be able to share securely governed data with national security and intelligence agencies. Privacy and civil-liberties safeguards matter but so does connecting the dots. When we fail to merge the domestic-abuse file and the radical-suspect file, we remain blind to the early tremors of extremist violence.

Third: fund the front lines. Supporting survivors is not charity — it is national-security policy. Shelters, crisis-counselling, exit-programmes for women who refuse subjugation weaken the networks of control that extremists rely on. Every woman who escapes coercion weakens the hands of those who would radicalise men. Recognising domestic violence as a security threat means that resources formerly reserved only for intelligence or police must be extended to social-services and survivor support.

This is about recognising a pattern: when misogyny festers, extremism follows. When women disappear, democracy falters. In the intelligence and security world we often ask: how did he turn violent? What made him kill? But maybe the more useful question is: how did he treat his partner or other women in his life? Did he suspend her rights? Did he escalate the abuse? That question might very well hold the key to the next plot.

The next time we search for the origins of terror, we should start with the police files marked “domestic assault.” Because before extremists target a nation, they almost always test their power on the women who share their homes.

Hon. Lisa MacLeod is a former Ontario Cabinet Minister responsible for Heritage, Immigation and Women’s Issues and is an Ambassador of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Joe Varner is Deputy Director of the Conference of Defence Associations and a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.