Men who consider themselves involuntarily celibate or “incels” have become significantly more radicalized over the past year and a half and are seeking to normalize child rape, a new report says. The report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s (CCDH) new Quant Lab concludes an investigation that analyzed more than one million posts on an incel forum. It found a marked spike in conversations about mass murder and growing approval of sexually assaulting prepubescent girls, reports the Washington Post. Platforms including YouTube and Google, as well as internet infrastructure companies like Cloudflare, are enabling the growth of the forum, which is reportedly visited by 2.6 million people every month. “These businesses should make a principled decision to withdraw their services from sites causing such significant harm,” the report says.
Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of CCDH, said, “Our study shows that [the movement] is organized, has a cogent ideology, and has clearly concluded that raping women, killing women, and raping children is a clear part of the practice of their ideology.” Incels blame their failings in life on women. While the first incel forum was founded by a woman in the mid-1990s, incel communities have since become almost exclusively male. Over the past decade, incel ideology has been linked to dozens of murders and assaults. In March the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center released a report warning that anti-woman violence was a growing terrorism threat. According to the CCDH analysis, members of the forum post about rape every 29 minutes, and more than 89 percent of posters support rape and say it’s acceptable. The CCDH analysis found that posters on the forum are seeking to normalize child rape. The report cited content that reflected the trend toward pedophilia, noting that a majority of commenters voiced support for a post that read, “As an incel, there is literally no reason to be against pedophilia.”