By Chantelle Cardona | 29 April 2024
On 13 April 2024 five women and a male security guard were stabbed to death in a crowded Bondi Junction shopping mall on Saturday afternoon by 40 year old Joel Cauchi, a Caucasian male of Australian-Maltese descent, and whilst he was apparently targeting women, NSW police determined the attack was not terrorist in nature. However, Cauchi had a history of mental illness and was living an itinerant lifestyle yet NSW police consider that description is enough to explain why he targeted women in public. Cauchi’s father told the BBC that his son was frustrated about not having a girlfriend. Cauchi was also described as an incel. Incels are men who hold to a violent misogynistic ideology that self-identify with this. While misogyny is an ideology, NSW police did not consider inquiring into it.
Two days after, on 15 April 2024, a 16 year old male, a minor who was acting in a manner that does not reflect a person of sound mind, attacked a priest, Bishop Mar Mari Emanuel, at the front of a globally televised sermon taking place at Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley. The minor including five additional teenage boys aged between 14-17 years were accused of following a violent extremist religious ideology and were charged with terrorism offenses in connection with the church stabbings.
The Terrorism (Police Powers) Act 2002 (NSW) defines a terrorist act as an action where:
"it is done with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause, and the action is done with the intention of coercing, or influencing by intimidation, the government of the Commonwealth or a State, Territory or foreign country, or of part of a State, Territory or foreign country, or intimidating the public or a section of the public."[1]
While the 16 year old who attacked Bishop Mar Mari Emanuel identified as Muslim, which would place his actions under the category of ‘religion’ under the Act, Joel Cauchi’s actions were based on him being a misogynist yet his actions were quickly deemed a mental health issue.
According to Latimore and Coyne from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute described incels as:
“a person who struggles to establish romantic and/or sexual relationships. Beyond a label of personal identity, the term also refers to a certain ideology and an online subculture, movement or community. Incels are a subgroup of a wider collection of online and offline communities that share overlapping misogynistic and male-supremacist ideologies otherwise referred to as the ‘manosphere’.”[2]
In other countries such as Canada, the USA and United Kingdom where mass killings and stabbings caused by incels have been regarded as a form of terrorist act, the Australian Police Force is unaware of this phenomenon which has been on the rise over the decades. That is because the Australian legal system does not consider misogyny to be an ideology despite the fact that incels, being a rising phenomenon, are usually associated with far-right ideologies.
While both these criminal acts happened two days apart and, were very similar to each other, it would explain why people would perceive that the police applied a double standard when dealing with these two stabbing attacks in Sydney. It would appear that there was more focus on the Bondi attacker’s mental health and not him being an incel who’s misogynistic beliefs are associated with far-right ideologies while all attention was focused on the religion of the attacker at the Assyrian congregation.
Chantelle Cardona is a Solicitor admitted in the Supreme Court of New South Wales. She holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Economics from Western Sydney University and a Graduate Certificate in Professional Legal Practice at the University of Technology Sydney.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Terrorism (Police Powers) Act 2002 (NSW), Part 1, Section 1(a)-(c)
[2] Jasmine Latimore and John Coyne, ‘Incels in Australia: The ideology, the threat, and a way forward’ 2023 (August) Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Special Report, 6.