boys roughhouse
Redefining Boys as Terrorists
Bettina Arndt, Quadrant, 19 Feb 2026
Worried about the boys in your life? Be warned. Our government is out to get them. In early January, when our country was still reeling from the Bondi Massacre, all the talk was about violent extremism. We watched the disgraceful Albanese government ducking and weaving to avoid naming Islamic extremism as the ideology which inspired that appalling event.
How convenient that on January 7, the day before our Prime Minister finally caved and agreed to the Royal Commission, our media was diverted by a news story reporting on a Melbourne University study into what they claimed was another driver of violent extremism. You guessed it – misogyny.
“Almost 40 per cent of Australian boys support violent extremist ideologies while more than a third have misogynistic attitudes towards women,” spluttered outraged media reports. Newspapers quoted Dr Sara Meger, the lead researcher, who said her findings revealed strong and significant correlations between misogynist attitudes and support for violent extremism. Apparently “disturbingly high” anti-feminist views were held by the boys aged 13 to 17 included in the study. And that’s the real point – they say “misogyny,” but they mean disagreeing with feminist beliefs.
The timely release of this unpublished research comes as no surprise. Sara Meger has been targeting boys for many years now and this was an ideal moment to attract international attention. The feminist scholar is a lecturer in feminist international relations and international security, and this new research is simply the latest round of her ongoing project on “Misogyny and Youth Radicalisation Leading to Violent Extremism.”
More about this deeply flawed, nonsensical research later. What’s important to understand is that the feminist mafia controlling our universities have been linking misogyny to extremism for nearly a decade.Check out the Australian Institute of International Affairs, a respected thinktank precluded under its charter from promoting ideology. Yet from 2018 onwards this organisation has been publishing articles identifying misogyny as a form of violent extremism. The most recent example, by Deakin University lecturer Dr Shannon Zimmerman, quotes UN Security Council Resolution 1325 which ludicrously claims “conflict and war have a disproportionate impact on women and girls.” Hmmm, apart from all those dead soldiers, who are almost all men. Zimmerman argues that it follows “special effort is needed to be taken to ensure the protection of women and girls from violence” and this requires addressing gender-based responses to extremism – which is her claimed expertise.
There are dozens of similar examples of feminist academics across Australia pushing this line, publishing articles, speaking at conferences, and making submissions to national security inquiries arguing that misogyny is a cause, sometimes even the cause of right-wing extremism. And they are packing a punch.