“The Perfect Aryan Housewife”: Intersection of Extremist Violence and Violence Against Women

Abstract

Despite rhetoric on the association between violence against women and extremist violence, little empirical work has examined the intersection of these forms of violence. Relying on open-source data from the Extremist Crime Database, we examine how these forms of violence intersect in terms of a strained dominant masculinity. Among the 54 extremist offenders with documented histories of violence against women, extremist offenders committed familicides (n = 23), or violence against women as a precursor to extremist violence (n = 25). For a small minority of offenders (n = 6), these forms of violence intersected in a form of settling scores against women and minoritized groups.