Violent Misogyny Is a Security Threat. Women Lead the Response.

On International Women's Day, discussions about gender and safety often focus on women as targets, and rightly so. Women and girls continue to face disproportionate violence online and offline worldwide. Violent misogyny isn’t just a social issue. It’s a security threat, and one of the most reliable early warning signs of radicalization toward violent extremism. At Revontulet, women lead much of the work to keep communities safe, underscoring the strategic importance of celebrating diversity to combat radicalization.

The common denominator

In every branch of violent extremism we track, from far-right to Islamist, incel-motivated, nihilist, and accelerationist movements, misogyny consistently appears as a common factor.

This is not a coincidence. Research by Monash University and UN Women found that hostile sexist attitudes and support for violence against women are the strongest factors linked to support for violent extremism, more significant than religiosity, education level, age, or employment status. In three countries surveyed, individuals who support violence against women were three times more likely to support violent extremism. Misogynistic beliefs don't just coexist with violent extremism. They reinforce it, normalise it, and in many cases, precede it.

A UK nationally representative survey confirmed that misogyny predicts violent extremist intentions, willingness to engage in interpersonal violence, and increased support for violence against women, especially among men who experience a sense of violated entitlement. Additionally, a two-wave panel study from Austria provided empirical evidence that exposure to misogynistic content on social media directly increases contact with far-right material over time, and boosts support for political violence. The pipeline from the manosphere to organised violent extremism is documented, measurable, and accelerating.

The pattern is evident in numerous cases. As Cynthia Miller-Idriss documents in her 2025 book Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism, attackers who targeted a yoga studio in Tallahassee, a sorority house in California, pedestrians in Toronto, and massage parlours in Atlanta all had documented histories of violent hostility toward women. The men who plotted to kidnap Michigan's governor used explicitly misogynistic language that was dismissed in court as merely venting. A study of fatal mass shootings found that 59 percent involved domestic violence, and in 68 percent of cases, the shooter had a history of gender-based violence. And these are just the cases that make headlines.

A gateway, a driver, an early warning sign

The OSCE, the UN, and research published by GNET have all identified misogyny as a gateway, driver, and early warning sign for violent extremism. ISD has documented how misogynistic content pervades ideological pathways to extremism across the spectrum, recommending that platforms recognise it as a vector for radicalisation. Academic research across the UK and Australia has shown that misogynistic narratives serve as a shared vocabulary across transnational far-right networks. This linking identity factor facilitates communication and recruitment across borders and local contexts.

Yet despite this evidence, misogyny is still often treated as secondary to security issues. Domestic violence is labeled as "private." Gender-based hostility is seen as a personality issue rather than an ideological sign. Most national security systems in the U.S. and other countries still do not systematically monitor misogynistic motives — which means, as Miller-Idriss argues, the absence of data is mobilised as evidence of the absence of a problem.

This is an intelligence failure, but one that the field is increasingly prepared to handle.

What this means for our work

At Revontulet, we map adversarial networks across interconnected threat domains, including terrorism, organised crime, financial crime, cybercrime, and disinformation. Understanding how misogynistic narratives operate within and between these domains is central to our analysis.

When tracking extremist recruitment, we focus on gendered grievance narratives as a key entry point. In investigating threat actors, histories of gender-based violence are among the most consistent behavioral indicators. In online monitoring, misogynistic content acts as a link connecting otherwise separate extremist ideologies.

Recognizing misogyny as a threat indicator improves intelligence, enhances risk assessments, and strengthens early warning systems. This is an analytical stance, not a political one.

Women lead in intelligence and safety

It is notable that the security field has been slow to recognise gendered threats. This highlights a systemic issue stemming from the field's own gendered issues and traditional lack of diverse and underrepresented voices, including women’s. This creates significant blind spots that the field must recognize and address. The field as a whole has a long way left to go in adequately addressing this.

At Revontulet, we understand violent extremism as the violent denial of diversity. To combat this, we must recognize the systemic and structural failures and the harms that the lack of diversity in the security field reflects and results in. We reflect this in numerous ways. We have a global team, bringing rich cultural, linguistic, technical, and political skills and understanding to our work. The majority of our team are women. Women lead our intelligence gathering, data, and research operations and often address challenging, sometimes dangerous subjects.

The team brings deep expertise to every engagement. From monitoring extremist networks to developing analytical tools, they advance the work that keeps our clients, platforms, and communities safe.

This International Women's Day, we celebrate the contributions of the women on our team. The work is demanding, the field can be challenging, and their impact is significant.

Looking forward

Violent misogyny is a growing threat. It fuels radicalisation. It enables recruitment. It predicts violence.

The intelligence and security community needs to integrate gendered analysis into its threat models, not as a concession to advocacy, but because it produces better results. 

At Revontulet, we will continue to track these networks, map their connections, and deliver intelligence that reflects the full complexity of the threat landscape, including gendered dimensions that are often overlooked.