When Violent Scripts Travel

Why youth violence, online repertoires and old policy categories no longer line up

Apr 16, 2026

Recent school attacks in different parts of the world often look disturbingly familiar, even when their motives do not. Even this week, reports of school shootings in Turkey have carried a grim sense of recognisability: not because the cases are proven to belong to one shared ideology, but because the wider forms of school violence now travel in ways that make geographically distant events feel symbolically familiar. The same gestures recur: leakage, symbolic staging, perpetrator fascination, misogynistic grievance, visual borrowing, manifesto-thinking, fantasies of being seen. What seems to be spreading is not one ideology, but a repertoire. Violent scripts now travel across borders faster than the categories meant to explain them. Research published in 2018 already described a “global online subculture” surrounding school shootings, built around shared interests, cultural objects and the recirculation of media content across national boundaries. More recent analysis suggests that this environment has evolved into wider digital ecosystems in which perpetrators are researched, aestheticised, imitated and absorbed into a shared mythos. (Sage Journals)

That does not mean every act of youth violence belongs to the same phenomenon. It does not mean all school attacks are ideological. It does not mean every teenager drawn to dark or violent material is on a pathway to real-world harm. But it does mean that online spaces now store and circulate templates for how violence can be imagined, narrated and performed. The older language of copycat behaviour is no longer quite enough. The better frame is repertoire: a portable mix of symbols, fantasies, communicative forms and subcultural references that can be picked up in different local settings and combined with very different personal grievances.

For parents, teachers and youth workers, this sits in the gut before it ever becomes a policy question. It is the sickening uncertainty of not knowing what you are seeing when a young person starts changing in troubling ways: becoming more withdrawn, more angry, more fixated, more theatrical, more drawn to violent material or dark online worlds. Adults are left trying to judge whether this is distress, fantasy, performance, hatred, a bid for attention, or a real movement towards harm. Sometimes it may be more than one of these at once. That is what makes the current moment so difficult. The categories meant to guide us feel too blunt, while the digital environments shaping young people’s imaginations have become faster, denser and harder to read.

The ICCT’s work on transnational far-right violence is useful here because it shows how manifestos, livestreams, attack announcements and writings on weapons can function as an interconnected genre set, helping to normalise and transmit violent scripts across borders. (Perspectives on Terrorism)

This is one reason recent cases in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Europe and Australia should not be treated only as isolated national stories. The contexts differ, sometimes sharply. The motives differ too. But the wider digital environment increasingly looks shared. Reuters reported in March 2026 that authorities in Southeast Asia were confronting a rise in teenagers being drawn into white supremacist content online, particularly through Telegram, with officials in several countries warning about youth plots and acts of violence. The same report linked the November 2025 Jakarta high-school bombing to white supremacist inspiration and described the portability of global mass-killer symbolism into a local youth context. That does not prove a unified global movement. It does show that violent imagery, aesthetics and identity cues can travel a long way from their original political and cultural settings. (Reuters)

Europe offers a slightly different but related picture. Europol’s 2025 TE-SAT reports that the number of minors and young people involved in terrorist and violent extremist activities in the EU continued to grow in 2024. It also states that social isolation, mental health problems and digital dependency were highly instrumental in radicalisation, and describes online communities that recruit minors and young adults into extreme violence directed at themselves and others. The significance of this is not that everything has become “extremism.” It is that youth violence, self-harm, ideological material and digitally mediated belonging now overlap in ways that institutions struggle to parse. (Europol)

Australia points to a similar concern from another angle. The Australian Institute of Criminology has argued that as violent extremism becomes more salient across the internet, the risk of individuals being radicalised online, recruited into violent extremist groups, or inspired or directed online to carry out real-world violence also increases. That matters because the pathways in question do not run only through explicitly political websites or formal organisations. They can also move through youth-oriented digital spaces where irony, fandom, grievance, misogyny, status performance and violent symbolism blur together. (Australian Institute of Criminology)

This is where the category problem becomes impossible to ignore. Public debate often asks whether a case is “really” extremism, “really” misogyny, “really” mental illness, “really” bullying, “really” school-shooter fandom, or “really” just individual pathology. But some recent cases suggest that these distinctions, while still important, no longer map cleanly onto how violent repertoires spread or how young people absorb them. A teenager may move between school-shooter fascination, racist symbolism, misogynistic grievance, gore communities, nihilistic humour and fantasies of significance without ever arriving at a coherent doctrine. The ideology may be shallow, unstable or mixed. The repertoire is what holds.

That is exactly why this should not be read as an argument for broadening counter-extremism categories until they swallow everything else. Quite the opposite. The UK Home Affairs Committee warned this week that Prevent is “unprepared to deal with the reality of modern extremism,” that more referrals now involve people with no clear ideological motivation, and that many such cases would be better handled through other forms of support. The Committee called for a multi-agency triage approach rather than defaulting to a counter-terror mindset. In other words, the policy danger is not only underreaction. It is category creep: trying to force diverse forms of youth distress, fixation, symbolic violence, misogynistic grievance and harmful online immersion into blunt security frameworks that were not designed to understand them. (UK Parliament Committees)

That caution matters politically as well as analytically. Written evidence to the same inquiry from Gabe Mythen, Laura Naegler and Jacob Astley makes the point clearly: mixed, unclear and unstable forms are becoming more prominent, but they remain poorly understood, and it is crucial first to ask whether violent viewpoints are actually underpinned by a coherent ideological worldview. They also argue that early intervention does not require that every troubling case be pulled inside counter-extremism; safeguarding systems already exist, at least in principle, if practitioners can properly distinguish between criminal, welfare and counter-extremism concerns. That is a much more useful way of thinking about the issue. (UK Parliament Committees)

So the problem is not simply that dangerous ideas are spreading. It is that violent scripts are moving through digital culture faster than public systems can interpret them. Some are ideological in a conventional sense. Some are not. Some are hybrid. Some are better understood through the lens of school attack fixation, misogynistic grievance, social isolation, trauma, youth alienation or wider safeguarding failure. The important point is that the same online infrastructures can host all of these. They can store violent archives, reward leakage, glorify perpetrators, circulate symbols stripped of context, and teach young people that violence is not only an act but a form of communication.

The West Point analysis of the so-called True Crime Community is useful precisely because it captures this shift. The authors argue that at its most extreme, digitally mediated participation turns violence into a symbolic language rather than a straightforward ideological act. That idea helps explain why some recent youth violence feels both politically charged and strangely incoherent. The perpetrator may be borrowing from white supremacism, school-shooter fandom, misogynistic rage and transgressive internet culture all at once. What matters is not whether every element is sincerely believed. What matters is that these repertoires give shape to grievance and offer a recognisable route to status, fear, memorability or belonging. (Combating Terrorism Center at West Point)

That leaves a difficult task for anyone trying to think seriously about prevention. It is not enough to hunt for ideology in the narrow doctrinal sense. It is not enough to pathologise individual young people while ignoring the environments they inhabit. It is not enough to collapse complex youth behaviour into “extremism” because there is nowhere else for the concern to go. And it is not enough to treat online platforms as passive containers while they continue to accelerate circulation, visibility and recirculation. If violent repertoires are now global, then prevention has to be broader than content takedowns and broader than referral mechanisms. It has to involve design, moderation, early support, school-based threat and safeguarding literacy, youth mental health, family support, and better ways of distinguishing between ideological commitment, symbolic borrowing, performative threat and wider harm. (Australian Institute of Criminology)

This is where the idea of safety by default matters. Systems built for scale, engagement and frictionless circulation are not neutral when they host communities organised around perpetrator fascination, coded symbolism, violent humour and memetic hate. They make it easier for repertoires to move. They allow children and teenagers to encounter violent scripts not as extraordinary material found at the edge, but as ambient culture: clipped, subtitled, aestheticised and passed around with varying degrees of irony. The issue is not only whether a platform “hosts extremist content.” It is whether it helps violent repertoires become legible, portable and socially meaningful to young users. (Reuters)

What is spreading, then, is not one pure ideology and not one uniform type of offender. It is a repertoire. A set of cues, images, fantasies and communicative forms through which violence can be imagined, rehearsed and made meaningful across different settings. The challenge for policy is that this repertoire crosses ideological and non-ideological spaces alike, while the systems meant to respond still rely on categories that are too blunt, too siloed and too slow. If we want to understand the future of youth violence prevention, we need to pay attention not only to the child in crisis, but to the transnational digital cultures teaching children what crisis can look like when staged for an audience. (Sage Journals)

The policy lesson is not that every troubling case should be pulled into counter-extremism, nor that schools should respond with blanket suspicion. Prevention starts earlier than that. It includes building educational environments that reduce humiliation, exclusion and grievance, strengthen belonging, and avoid creating hardened divisions between those who feel inside and those who feel cast out. Alongside structured ways to notice and respond to serious concern, schools need inclusive cultures, fair discipline, anti-bullying work, restorative approaches and stronger routes between concern and care. For cases that are serious but unclear, the answer should be safeguarding-led multi-agency triage, not automatic counter-extremism routing. And for digital systems, the challenge is not only explicit extremist content, but the recommendation, glorification and circulation mechanisms through which violent repertoires become visible, meaningful and socially rewarding to young users.

Safe by Default

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When Violent Scripts Travel

Why youth violence, online repertoires and old policy categories no longer line up

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