The Bondi Stabbings: how misogyny motivated a psychotic attack

The Sydney Bondi Westfield shopping mall is one I know extremely well as I live ten minutes away. I would end up in there for an hour or two each week because my physiotherapist is nearby. Since my partner and I sustained life-changing injuries in a fatal tour bus crash, I would, after physio, as my partner had her treatment, walk slowly and cautiously around the mall. I suffer PTSD from the crash; so, crowds and crowded places, loud noise, are enough to cause a panic attack. Slowly, unknowingly, this shopping mall became a safe space for me. I would shuffle around, buy Pokémon cards, Squishmallows to rest my broken back on, and the occasional coffee and cookie combination. I made friends with a few of the store workers. The injuries from the crash left me socially isolated, I can’t do what I did before, I have chronic pain: the crash was life-changing. It is odd to say, but on reflection, the shopping mall became a haven for me; a place to get a little treat after painful physio sessions. On Saturday, 13 April 2024, when I heard the news of the murders, I had a devastating panic attack.

The news hit me so hard. I had flashes of being safe and happy on the tour bus, and then suddenly, chaos, death, destruction. This felt so similar. As news spread of what had happened, about the people who had lost their lives, as footage was shown all over the world; everyone in the community was bound by grief at this awful tragedy. The shock, pain and disbelief that this could happen in the ‘eastern sydney burbs’ where gyms outnumber bars, probably. How could this have happened? No one should ever go out to the stores and not return home. But I wasn’t a victim of the attack, I wasn’t the target of the attack, my safe space wasn’t the target. No, as one brave witness and victim of this attack put it, "I thought, 'He's going after women'.”

Women were the target of this deadly attack. Dawn Singleton, Jade Young, Yixuan Cheng, Ashlee Good, Faraz Tahir, and Pikria Darchia are the victims of the Bondi attack. Five women and a man, a security guard employed at the mall, died. And at least 10 more, mostly women, were injured in the fatal attack. An untold number will have suffered mental trauma and anguish from being there that day. The pain and suffering of the loved ones of those killed is unimaginable. The courageous actions of a police inspector, Amy Scott, who, as the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, stated, had "run towards danger"; she stopped the attack.

In their final moments, there were incredible acts of bravery from those who lost their lives. And others who put themselves in danger to save strangers. An immense response came in the following weeks from the community, one of support and love; you could feel it on the streets. A testament to the fundamental strength of togetherness, which elevates people to their best selves. Together, not riddled with division.

The Bondi attack of April 2024 was the worst mass murder in Australia since October 2020 when a man cruelly set fire to a car, inside was his children and former partner, he murdered all four occupants in the car: Hannah Clarke and her three children, Aaliyah, Laianah, and Trey. The man, in a final act of cowardice, took his own life at the scene.

There was last year the murder of Lilie James. A family member of my partner had previously attended the school where Lilie James was abhorrently and tragically murdered. The murderer threw himself off a cliff in the eastern suburbs of Sydney; again, near where I live. The media at first showed a Romeo and Juliet affair that was nauseating and breathtakingly ignorant of the facts. A sympathetic headline has become the first line of defence for crimes committed by men. The media refuses to admit in earnest the pattern here that is all too obvious to everyone.

The school’s statement about the attack, in my opinion, was tactless; it proclaimed that the “horrors of evil" should not define the school community. They, I interpreted, blamed the death on evil. But defining something as ‘evil’ is conceptually and intellectually devoid of valid assessment. It rang hollow, like the 'thoughts and prayers' that follow every mass school shooting in the USA. It offers no critique, no movement, nothing to explain the proper context, the reasons behind the horror of this crime, that which might allow us to learn and, as a society, move forward and ensure it doesn't happen again. On this count, leadership has failed us in Australia.

The relatives and friends of Lilie James must have suffered an unknowable pain. With immense strength, they have made sure that Lilie is not defined by the manner of her death. Bravely, they have put forth the truth about what an amazing person Lilie was, how she had a thunderous zeal for life and for teaching: Lilie was a wonderful person. That is her story.

Two months before the Bondi attack in February 2024, a man, allegedly, killed his former boyfriend and new partner, Jesse Baird and Luke Davies. This was a few streets away from where my partner and I used to live in the Sydney inner-east suburb of Darlinghurst. After I had a hospital appointment nearby, we went past their house, and it wasn’t visible, for flowers covered every inch of Jesse Baird’s home. My partner and I cried in the car. How could a society that can come together to show such acts of compassion and community in times of grief also be a society that produces men capable of such destruction? Domestic violence, regardless of the gender of the victim, though the overwhelming majority of victims are women, is again, a crime committed almost entirely by men.

There is an epidemic of violence against women by men. These crimes are happening all around us (and I use the word women inclusively). The statistics concerning these crimes are a stain on humanity. The Australian Health Institute states that every 11 days a woman is killed by a man with who they are in an intimate relationship. According to the European Union Research Commission, 1 in 3 women globally face physical or sexual violence regularly. Yet in the most recent Australian Federal Election this epidemic of violence was barely mentioned. By no coincidence, men led all major Australian political parties. The Bondi Attack wasn’t discussed. Silence. As one commentator said, observed by Liz Plank in her book, For the Love of Men, “Men must understand their silence is part of the problem. Every man has a voice, and every man has a responsibility to use it.”

We are afraid to accept macro-societal facts. We are even worse at communicating them. Covid-19 was an example of how quickly an aligned cause, to help the most vulnerable people in society by staying inside at home whilst waiting for a vaccine, can evaporate into confusion, division, misinformation, and adversary.

It’s as if major commentators from all walks of life have stayed clear of this crisis. Maybe too many of them at university were devotees to the pursuit of Analytical Philosophy, which has dominated thought in the 20th and 21st century; it has us all examining individual things with a close closed eye, so much we cannot connect the dots on a larger canvas: one that would allow people to see a clear picture of this epidemic.

In this case, if leaders had taken a closer look at Hegelian philosophy, for example, with its emphasis on confronting problems through discussion, perhaps then we could be better served by having wide ranging conversations of substance across all levels; not only those small arbitrary differences that people make so much money from, by diverting attention to the spectre of 'the other', and in the process creating tribes and cults for who to extract wealth from. We desperately need to get back to discussing the importance of the values of truth, honesty, respect, virtue, and ethics. I don’t think that without this, we can even address the scale of the problem of men’s crimes against women; a sexism that has reached the level of gender-warfare. Without addressing it, how can we ever fix it?

A coronial inquest is currently taking place into the Bondi attack. To address and understand what happened. A psychiatrist assessed that the murders were not fueled by a psychotic or schizophrenia break but by a “hatred towards women”. The psychiatrist recanted this testimony the following day. That said, it is, on the balance of probabilities, and evidence presented so far before the inquest, that it seems more likely than not that the attacker was suffering some form of break with reality. Previous schizophrenia in the family, along with the reduction of treatment, the removal of medication for psychosis; these facts cannot be ignored, but, crucially, neither can the misogynistic behaviours of the attacker that have been shown at the inquest. This misogyny motivated the Bondi attack.

The assailant had a ‘frustration towards women’, as his mother outlined, a high level of anger towards a sex worker, and a heavy addiction to online pornography. Two things can be true: the attacker can have a serious mental health illness and be infected with the systemic misogyny and sexism of our time. A gargantuan leviathan of toxic masculinity and gender-warfare combine to create our world, where men routinely attack women, and many do so with impunity. Many attackers become Presidents, manosphere influencers, or they run out the clock without ever facing justice. This is because we don’t want to accept the narrative that men are guilty of orchestrating systemic attacks on women on a massive scale. And part of what allows this has been the creation and perpetuation of a culture of misogyny that is impregnable; to the extent that it has become the ideology of everyday people. It allows men to get away with serious attacks without repercussion; men can act in relationships with a wide degree of permissibility, doing awful things, and these actions are wrongfully disregarded and misjudged because ‘boys will be boys’. This is the reason women choose the bear. The lack of acceptance of this narrative haunts us intensely because it is so extremely evident, yet so lacking in address. The Bondi attacker was in a probable state of some form of psychosis, and misogyny informed this state as to how he should act violently, and who should be the target of that violence.

There are three key elements that I wish to look at that motivated this man. The first thing here that propels this forward to a grave act of gender-warfare against women is the attacker's addiction to pornography. The attacker was 40, meaning he grew up at a time when the internet was the wild west, where young people, who often understood the internet better than their parents, were downloading songs via LimeWire and watching pornography en masse. Pornography swept through the internet; and many, understandably, were afraid to lose any of the hard-won sexual freedoms and sexual liberations, which is correct, but it meant a monster grew on the internet screens that adult and young men, then and now, digest with rapidness and without thought to the harm. This is (obviously) not to say women don’t watch pornography, they do; but what is being watched is the key to understanding how this addiction seeped in a hatred towards women.

A whole generation of children and teenagers was subjected to a new type of pornography. Immediately available. Grotesque in some deeper wells. The misogyny and degradation of women in much of this pornography, unknowing of the level of consent for those involved, the mass uploading of videos without a women's consent; or underage girls as was proven to be the case, for example, on the video hosting site Pornhub. The dangers of watching can be pernicious as these sites send users down rabbit holes that end up directing them to 'harder porn'. To have your audience consume more and more content is not only the desire of Netflix, but porn-sites also, and they do it with malicious intent. To push people towards ‘live-cam’ pornography, or to sex workers, they own. The opaque nature of this industry, its lack of regulation and policing, is one of the greatest failings of modern governance.

Whilst there now exists avenues for sex workers to be in charge of the content that they produce, this is only a recent fractional change; and this is not presently available to all women, those trafficked or preyed upon, or who have little alternative, they are directed by violent men, who produce violent videos; pornography has made an enormous impact in reshaping the dimensions of sex to the abusive. The growing rise, and associated danger, in choking during intercourse has, by many commentators, been a result of porn directing actual real-life sex.

A consent-based approach to pornography can and does exist, and should, with the sensibility that we don’t wish to reverse course on the sexual freedoms, or infringe upon the sexual-liberation and the freedoms of others. Yet, the terrible first-wave, with countless victims across the world brought in to meet demand did not have this and it never went away, and to this day it continues. This took a drastic worsening as cameras became available to everyone on their phone, so revenge porn by men destroyed many lives, it was legal for years. Women were always the ones who society blamed. It was, illogically, somehow their fault. Upskirting, the crime of taking a photo of a woman under her dress, was legal in the UK for years, while thousands upon thousands of these pictures of women were uploaded to the internet, legally.

The Australian government has banned under-16 year-olds from social media, but it cannot produce an effective way to allow only 18-year-olds and older to be the sole people who access porn: it’s inexcusable. The UK, for instance, tried and then failed to implement age verification software. There exists little to no political attitude to tackle the problems which contribute to the misogyny of today, and nowhere is this more evident than online.

When an Ivy League University in the mid-2010s set out to research the effect of pornography on young men in American college campuses, it was impossible to do. They could find no control group. They could find no men who were not consuming pornography. If everyone smoked and everyone got cancer, there would be no non-smokers to tell us the connection between smoking and cancer. Most pornography actively depicts harm to women, and it means that this is what a generation of men grew up watching: this includes the Bondi attacker.

There are many current high profile, and creepy, examples of men and porn addiction. Disgraced Tory MP Neil Parish watched porn in the UK Commons Chamber; Republican Speaker of the House in the USA, Mike Johnson, has a porn app tracker...with his son. The actor Terry Crews has spoken with frankness about his pornography addiction. Pornography viewing and addiction to it, and the harms of watching it, have at best been understated for years, but far more likely is it wasn't a priority for politicans (who are mostly male) and that the result of being exposed to this type of pornography has been vastly devastating, and the ills have been ignored. And when you understand the fact that many of these women, millions, are trafficked, underage, and are victims. Men are watching crimes of sexual assault on a mass scale. It’s staggering. You can look at The Exodus Road for more detailed data on this.

The Bondi attacker was addicted to pornography. We can state with a relatively high degree of certainty that much of the porn he consumed would have been aggressive and degrading towards women. This shaped his mental condition.

As mentioned, there now exists, fractionally, a consent-based pornography, owned and controlled by women, by sex workers, or pornographic content creators, who have full control over their work, which is a certainly a step in the right direction for those who wish to access pornography, and be as sure as they can be that there isn't a victim involved. How much of that content continues to serve the male gaze, the male libido, rather than pushing us closer to an ‘equality of pleasure’ where sex is communicated openly: we don’t know. The issue of how pornography, even consent based, interferes with the need and development for enthusiastically consensual sex, alongside a realistic depiction of sex, is troubling. As political commentator, Hannah Ferguson, writes in Bite Back, “pleasure, desire and sex are about agency, empowerment and shared connection”.

Secondly, we have the ‘anger towards a sex worker’ over an imagined sexually transmitted disease. Sex work is legal in Australia and regulated, to a degree. The Bondi attacker is forming a wrong, yet stereotypical, depiction of women who as sex workers are seen as worthless, or predatory to the good virtue of men; a misogynistic form of this has existed in society pretty much forever in the western cannon, from the ‘world's oldest profession' trope, to the Christian mythology, which begins with Eve giving Adam the apple. This has them, and humanity, kicked out of Paradise. All due to a woman's gullibility at believing a talking snake. The 'original sin' in the Christian sense came from a woman. This anger towards women from men is forcefully put onto sex workers, who are often some of the most at-risk people in society, the least protected, most exploited, and the compassion they receive is abysmal. Compare the lack of interest in seeking missing sex workers in the media to the grandiose pedestal that the story of the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper receives. Jack the Ripper has been depicted ad infinitum in modern media and entertainment. This is a man who murdered sex workers in Victorian London. It shows a desire by society to dismiss sex workers as less than human beings. In this instance, we are closer to the male killer and his ‘legendary’ status than any of his victims. Everyone knows Jack the Ripper, but how many can name one of his victims?

The anger at this misperceived wrongdoing from a sex worker meant the Bondi attacker attached that anger to all women. In this sense, there are many more constructed classes of women than men, and it's men who have, for their own gain, defined, enforced and ensured the reproduction of those classes. Women are not immune to falling prey to this misogynistic thinking by men. A friend said to me last year, “don’t you think men are getting it from all sides at the moment”, her girlfriend and I looked at her slightly confused at this manosphere talking point. As it turns out, her flatmate at the time was a die-hard MAGA, Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and Russell Brand devotee. Men become stans for awful men. These people have prominent platforms which give them legitimacy that they shouldn’t have.

Finally, we have the ‘frustrations towards women’ which the inquest has discovered with certainty was the attackers state of mind before the attack; this may as well be the incel moto, it's unacceptable sexism, and it stems from the two elements outlined before, alongside many other conditions, these flow to the Bondi attacker and turn into an anger against women, and this anger it’s not on the fringes. It doesn’t belong just to a person suffering mental health issues, it’s here in the middle of society. Commentary regarding women as subjects to men, or a lesser gender, has risen with a speed that sees those who would previously have been shunned be accepted and ideologised; the Andrew Tate-ification. We don’t know if the attacker watched Andrew Tate, but it would be no surprise if he consumed this or similar content.

In conclusion, we cannot allow a mental illness to distract from the conditions and behaviours of misogyny that motivated and propelled the Bondi attack. If we do so, we are no closer to ending the epidemic of violence against women by men than we were before these people's worlds were torn away. If we stop short of calling out the culpability of men, and how they are responsible for the violence against women, and the high levels of domestic abuse; we are failing as a people.

It should be made clear that women hold no responsibility for the welfare of men’s mental health. That responsibility lies with men, the healthcare capacities of a society, the knowledge given to men, the experiences made for men, and how men learn to cope internally with the world today. Lots of things impact men’s mental health. Women are not one of them. Neither do they bear any responsibility for solving this issue. This violence against women is an issue for men to solve urgently. Because it's men who are exploiting and attacking women! The cognitive dissonance of right-wing commentators to run roughshod over this issue, reversing it in some instances, or citing pseudo-science fixes, blaming women, complete denial, and leaders, both political and cultural, who have been presenting a narrative of betterment through further misogyny as the answer. Because this gives some of them cover for their own crimes? It's definitely a possibility — Donald Trump is an adjudicated sexual assaulter, but can still be President, does this encourage misogyny? Without question.

Men are committing gender-warfare against women. The Bondi attack was a terrifying tentacle of this epidemic. The Bondi attack is misogyny. Men must look at themselves, their peer groups, the behaviours in them, and stop misogyny when they see it. We urgently need a greater effort from the media and policymakers to stop this epidemic of violence against women. If not, then another attack will come.

This article is a part of ‘The Lord of Rome’ commentary:

The Lord of Rome: Epidemic (I)

The Lord of Rome is a progressive social commentary on men, born from the simple idea: if some men can think about the Roman Empire every day, then every day all men can think about how they can end the epidemic of violence by men towards women, girls, and victims of domestic abuse.

The Lord of Rome seeks also to end the high rate of mental health illness and suicide in men, to open up multiple opportunities for men to create new inclusive narratives as to their identity and promote new open forms of what being a man, man-ness, or young adult man can mean; to fight a counter culture movement that redefines the world for men and recaptures the mythology of men from the nefarious misogynistic actors whose toxic ideas and commentary have permeated the mainstream. This is not apologising for men. This is for all men to view and think about their shared responsibility in this world. For all men to understand their behaviour and actions. This is recognising the problems and the creation of change. Giving men the means and insight to craft a new story.

The Lord of Rome is a progressive voice for urgent change.

Written by Joshua Clements: Joshua has a Degree in Sociology and a Masters in Political Theory from Cardiff University. Joshua worked in Westminster, London, for nearly a decade in the Government Affairs industry, and now lives in Sydney, Australia. He is a proud feminist.