The crossbow attack in Leeds is the latest in a pattern of violent misogyny that the UK continues to overlook. Until we recognise misogyny as terrorism, these threats will keep growing unchecked.
A 38-year-old man armed with a crossbow and a firearm went on a violent rampage in Leeds late last week, seriously injuring two women. The attacker, Owen Lawrence, struck on 26 April in the Headingley area – a busy student district known for the “Otley Run” pub crawl – before being subdued and arrested by police.
Both victims, aged 19 and 31, were rushed to hospital; one underwent emergency surgery for life-threatening wounds. Lawrence himself was taken into custody with self-inflicted injuries and died in hospital days later, on 29 April. Counter-terrorism police, who recovered the crossbow and a gun at the scene, said they believe he acted alone. While the physical wounds from the attack are beginning to heal, both women have now been discharged from hospital.
In the aftermath, investigators uncovered a chilling trail on Lawrence’s social media. Just hours before the attack, he had posted a rambling “manifesto” outlining plans for what he dubbed the “Otley Run Massacre”. In these writings, Lawrence fantasised about “spree killing, mass murder, terrorism, revenge, [and] misogynistic rage”. He listed a slate of intended targets, including students, pub-goers, “society, humanity, the human race, neurotypicals and police” (essentially anyone in his path). Tellingly, his screed explicitly cited hatred of women: he railed against “gender equality… ‘feminists of all four waves’… ‘feminoids’… ‘female empowerment’” among a litany of other grievances.
It appears Lawrence had been stewing in a mix of far-right conspiracy theories and violent misogyny online. Posts linked to him referenced the white-supremacist “great replacement” theory and even the manifesto of the Christchurch mosque shooter. A photo on his profile showed him posing with a weapon and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “natural selection” (a disturbing nod to the Columbine killers). This toxic ideology translated into real-world violence on that April afternoon.
What’s equally disturbing is that Lawrence’s misogynistic tendencies were not confined to the internet. Reports have since emerged of a history of abuse towards women in his personal life. According to the Times, a relative of his ex-fiancée said she was “not surprised” to learn Lawrence was behind the attack. He had allegedly stalked his former partner after she left him, lurking outside her mother’s house night after night despite police warnings.
This pattern of behaviour is grimly familiar. Time and again, men who commit mass violence have a trail of domestic abuse or hatred of women in their past. It’s a through-line from private misogyny to public atrocity. As one neighbour of Lawrence remarked, “He should have been sectioned a while ago… I cannot understand why no one stopped him before”. Yet even those close to him did not grasp the danger. Some neighbours dismissed his violent talk as mere far-right ranting or drug-fuelled instability, insisting “He did not hate women”. In reality, his online diatribes show he absolutely did. The warning signs, from stalking to social media threats, were there in plain sight.
Post-attack, counter-terrorism police took charge of the case, treating it only as a potential terrorist incident – “terrorism” being exactly how Lawrence himself labelled his mission. A recovered cache of weapons previously mentioned (a crossbow and a firearm) emphasises just how deadly serious his intentions were. And yet, as I followed the news, I noticed an uneasy hesitation to call this what it was. Officials spoke of an “isolated incident,” and even days later, the senior national counter-terror coordinator had “still to declare” the attack as terrorism.
The Leeds crossbow attack is not an outlier, but part of a disturbing rise in violent misogyny that the UK can no longer afford to ignore. In January, a leaked Home Office report identified the toxic “manosphere” of online misogyny as a breeding ground for extremism. The review, commissioned by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, warned that male supremacist ideologies like the involuntary celibate (incel) movement were feeding into real-world violence. It noted overlap between these misogynist subcultures and other extremist beliefs, observing that incel narratives often absorb far-right tropes and conspiracy theories. Lawrence tragically personified this convergence – a jobless, self-proclaimed far-right extremist who also raged against women.
His attack in Leeds is not disimilar to the 2021 Plymouth shooting, when a 22-year-old man steeped in incel forums shot dead five people including his own mother. In the Plymouth case, an inquest heard how the gunman had frequented hate-filled incel sites and harboured obsessive resentment towards women. Yet police controversially concluded that misogynistic propaganda was not the primary motive for that massacre. The perpetrator was not prosecuted under terrorism laws, and the ideological nature of the crime was downplayed.
Further still, just last summer, an 18-year-old man carried out a horrific assault on a dance studio in Southport, Merseyside, stabbing and killing three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed class. He, too, acted alone and appeared motivated by a generalised hatred of women. In that case, we later learned the teenager, Axel Rudakubana, had been referred to the Prevent anti-terror programme three times prior to the killings, but each case was closed because he didn’t fit any clear extremist ideology. After Rudakubana pleaded guilty in January, even the prime minister struggled to categorise the crime. “It’s understandable the public would look at [this] and wonder what the word terrorism means,” Sir Keir Starmer admitted. Starmer described a “new kind of threat” from “loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom… desperate for notoriety” committing acts of extreme violence without “obvious political motive”.
In the UK, a woman is killed by a man every three days on average, yet as clearly seen in the aforementioned cases, these acts of male violence, even when clearly driven by hatred of women, are seldom treated with the same urgency as other extremist threats.
In each of these cases, the perpetrators were men fueled by grievances against women or society at large, radicalised in internet echo chambers of hate, and fixated on unleashing violence. Yet our legal system has lagged in recognising this pattern as a form of extremism. Misogyny is not formally classified as a hate crime in England and Wales, after ministers rejected a 2022 proposal to add it to hate crime laws. At the time, the Home Office waved off the idea, citing a report that bizarrely warned making misogyny a hate crime could be “more harmful than helpful” to women. That decision, coming in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder and an outcry over violence against women, felt like a cynical shrug. It meant police were not required to systematically record or monitor crimes driven by hatred of women. As a woman and a journalist who has spoken to countless victims, I found that stance indefensible.
Dr Lisa Sugiura, who studies online extremism, warns that much of the violently misogynistic content circulating online remains technically legal, hateful enough to radicalise, but not illegal enough to easily prosecute. Such material festers on unregulated platforms, recruiting angry young men into a worldview that glorifies hurting women.
If violent misogyny is a growing threat, it appears to be slipping through the cracks of Britain’s security apparatus. Incels account for only around 1% of referrals to the government’s Prevent anti-extremism programme, despite increased awareness after Plymouth. Analysts say many cases aren’t even reaching Prevent. Dr Andrew Thomas, co-author of a government study on incels, explains that officials often don’t see these angry young men as “extreme enough” compared to jihadists or neo-Nazis. Meanwhile, health and social services might view them as too extreme, a terror issue, rather than just troubled individuals. The result is a dangerous grey zone of “lost boys” falling off the radar. “Incels are ‘slipping through the net’ of government efforts,” experts recently warned, pointing to confusion over whether the problem is one of terrorism or mental health.
The case of Owen Lawrence, a self-radicalised loner broadcasting his deadly intent online without intervention, tragically emphasises that gap. Multiple opportunities to intervene were missed, from his past stalking behaviour to the hateful Facebook posts he published on the day of the attack. It’s exactly the scenario women’s rights campaigners feared when they pushed for misogyny to be taken seriously by security services. Yet the official approach remains piecemeal: some schools have begun incorporating discussions about incel culture and respect for women into the curriculum, and tech platforms are under pressure via the Online Safety Act to clamp down on extremist content. But there is no coordinated national strategy targeting misogynist radicalisation as a specific threat.
Beyond the ideological issues, the Leeds attack has also raised urgent questions about the weapon used. Why are crossbows still legal and readily available in the UK? Lawrence’s ability to arm himself with a crossbow (and apparently a firearm as well) speaks to a legislative blind spot. Under current British law, any adult over 18 can purchase a crossbow of any strength with no license or registration required.
There is an estimated stockpile of 200,000 crossbows in private hands across the country, completely untracked. These weapons may be rare, but their sporadic use in high-profile crimes has had horrific results.
Just last year, a former soldier named Kyle Clifford murdered three women –his ex-girlfriend, her sister and their mother – in a crossbow and knife attack in Hertfordshire. Clifford had a history of abuse; he raped his ex-partner before killing her and her family, and was sentenced in March to life in prison.
In another case in 2018, a man in East Yorkshire broke into his neighbours’ home and shot a pregnant woman with a crossbow, killing her partner in the process. The survivor of that attack, Laura Sugden, called it “unbelievable” that such a “lethal and medieval weapon” remained so easily available. She has since campaigned for what she calls “shotgun-style” licensing for crossbows, so that owners would require background checks and certificates much like firearm owners. But successive governments have dragged their feet.
After Sugden’s case and a notorious 2021 incident in which an intruder armed with a crossbow infiltrated Windsor Castle, the Home Office did agree to “review” crossbow regulations. It opened a public consultation last year, with a minister admitting that while crossbow attacks are rare, the weapons “can be highly dangerous”. Even so, officials indicated at the time that they had “no plans to legislate further” on crossbows. As of today, owning one still requires no more oversight than buying a kitchen knife. For women’s safety advocates, this is another example of lethargy in the face of evident danger – a willingness to tolerate risk until the body count becomes impossible to ignore.
The crossbow used in Leeds was a means to an end, the real threat came from the man wielding it and the hatred that drove him. But the ease with which that hatred was armed should give us pause. Lawrence’s attack was shocking, but sadly it was not unpredictable. It followed a now-familiar pattern: a man radicalised by misogyny and other hateful ideologies, a history of violence against women in his personal life, a legally obtained weapon, and a trail of red flags that went unheeded until it was too late. This time, mercifully, his intended victims survived. But the questions linger. How many warnings must we see in manifestos, in online forums, in homes scarred by domestic abuse, before misogynistic violence is treated as the clear and present danger it is?
For years, campaigners have asked the government to count misogynistic crimes, to make misogyny an aggravating factor in sentencing, to put violence against women and girls on the same strategic footing as terrorism. Those calls were met with half measures and polite nods. Now the stakes are too high to ignore. Misogyny must be treated as a form of extremism – not metaphorically, not someday, but right now. That means police and MI5 need to treat online threats against women with the same urgency as racist or sectarian threats. It means anti-radicalisation programs like Prevent must be willing to intervene with young men who show fixation on violent misogynistic content. It means our leaders, in their rhetoric and policy, should finally name this problem for what it is. We cannot continue to argue, as one Policy Exchange analyst did, that focusing on misogynistic violence will “swamp” our counter-terror agencies. The reality is quite the opposite: failing to confront this threat will leave us all less safe, by allowing a deadly ideology to grow unchecked.
I don’t pretend that redefining extremism is a simple solution. Cultural change is as vital as legal change. Misogyny is deeply rooted, and no law will purge it overnight. But removing our blinders is a necessary first step. When a man with a crossbow roams a university neighbourhood hunting women, that is not a random crime – it is the product of a radicalisation that we have been too slow to acknowledge. How many more women must be maimed or murdered by these “lone wolf” attackers before we accept that hate is hate, whatever the target? I am done treating these as one-off tragedies. Violent misogyny is terrorism in our midst, and it’s time the law treated it with the full gravity and resources that we marshal against other forms of extremism.
