Explaining Fascination-Based Violence: A Four-Component Model and the Ideology Threshold in Five Jurisdictions

For decades, security experts and researchers have operated under a single, powerful assumption about how people become violent: they believe that violence is the final step in a long journey of political or religious belief. The standard story goes that a person first adopts a radical idea, perhaps a desire to overthrow a government or enforce a religious law, and only later, as that belief deepens, do they decide that killing is necessary to achieve it. This framework has shaped how governments try to stop attacks, focusing their resources on finding people who are talking about specific causes, demanding specific changes, or belonging to groups with a clear agenda. But a new wave of cases is breaking this rule. In recent years, authorities in Europe and beyond have encountered individuals who are fixated on extreme violence, who consume hours of gruesome content, and who plan attacks, yet who seem to have no political cause, no religious mission, and no desire to change the world. They are not trying to build a new society; they are simply drawn to the act of destruction itself.

This gap between what security systems are looking for and what is actually happening is the focus of a new study by Domenico Galimi, a researcher at the University of London. The paper investigates a growing group of people who are fascinated by violence for its own sake, a phenomenon that current laws and prevention programs struggle to identify because they are built to detect ideology. The study argues that for these individuals, the path to violence is not a ladder of beliefs but a different kind of attraction entirely. It suggests that the desire to hurt others can exist without a "why," driven instead by the thrill of the act, the way it looks in online videos, and the status it brings within certain internet communities. By mapping out this new pathway, the research offers a way to understand why some dangerous people slip through the cracks of traditional counter-terrorism, and it proposes that the key to stopping them lies not in debating their politics, but in understanding the seductive power of violence itself.

The core of Galimi's work is a four-part model that describes how this fascination-based pathway unfolds. The first part is simply the attraction. Unlike the traditional view where a person joins a cause and then learns to hate, these individuals are first drawn to violent material because it feels exciting, intense, and meaningful in a visceral way. They spend hours watching videos of attacks, reading about gore, and immersing themselves in content that celebrates destruction. This is not a calculated decision to support a movement; it is a sensory pull, a feeling that the violence itself is compelling. The second part is mediation, which is the process of turning that raw attraction into a plan. In the online world, this attraction is shaped by images and stories. The individual begins to rehearse an attack, not as a political statement, but as a performance. They start to construct a persona, a character who will carry out the violence, and they begin to see the attack as a script they are meant to follow, complete with a specific style and a way of presenting themselves.

The third part of the model is motivation, but it comes from a source that has nothing to do with politics. In these online communities, status is awarded for escalating transgression. The more extreme the content a person shares, the more they hurt, or the more they threaten to hurt, the more "clout" or respect they gain from their peers. This creates a feedback loop where the only goal is to become more notorious, to be seen as the most dangerous person in the room. The final part is the setting itself: the online environment where all of this happens. These digital spaces act as a moral vacuum where harm is not just accepted but celebrated. They provide the rules, the language, and the rewards that make violence seem like a valid and even heroic option. Crucially, the study finds that in this sequence, ideology—if it appears at all—comes last. It is often just a thin layer of borrowed words or images added on top of the plan to make it look like it has a reason, but the real engine driving the person is the fascination with the act itself.

This finding challenges the way governments currently try to stop attacks. In the United Kingdom, for example, a major program called Prevent is designed to spot people at risk of radicalization. Its rules are built around the idea that a person must be moving toward a specific political or religious goal to be considered a threat. As a result, when a young person is referred to the program because they are obsessed with violence but have no clear ideology, they often get stuck. The system looks for a cause that isn't there, and the person is frequently turned away or dismissed. The paper highlights a tragic example of this failure: the 2024 attack in Southport, where a seventeen-year-old killed three children. Before the attack, this young man had been referred to the prevention program three times. Each time, the assessors could not find a coherent ideology behind his behavior, so they did not escalate the case to a higher level of support. A subsequent official inquiry concluded that the attack could and should have been prevented, but the system failed because it was looking for a political motive that the attacker did not have.

The study compares how different countries handle this problem, showing that most European legal systems are locked into the same trap. In Italy, Germany, and the European Union, the laws defining terrorism require that the violence be done to achieve a specific political or social goal. If a person plans a mass killing just for the sake of killing, or to cause chaos without a specific demand, the law often cannot classify it as terrorism, leaving a gap where these individuals fall outside the reach of special prevention measures. The United States is the only major jurisdiction that has tried to adapt. While its laws still require a political purpose for a crime to be officially labeled "terrorism," American authorities have created a separate, unofficial category for "nihilistic violent extremism." This category focuses on the person's hatred of society and their desire to cause collapse, rather than on a specific political goal. This allows them to investigate and intervene with people who are driven by pure destruction, even if they don't fit the strict legal definition of a terrorist.

The paper does not claim to have solved the problem of how to stop these individuals, but it does provide a much clearer picture of who they are and how they think. It suggests that the old tools of counter-terrorism, which rely on debating beliefs and dismantling political arguments, are useless against people who don't have beliefs to debate. Instead, the research points toward a need for new ways of identifying risk. It suggests that authorities should look less at what a person believes and more at what they are doing: how long they have been immersed in violent online communities, how they are trying to gain status through harm, and whether they are rehearsing an attack as a performance. The study also warns that this approach must be handled carefully. Many young people, especially those who are neurodivergent or have autism, might have intense interests in violent topics without any intention of hurting anyone. The challenge is to tell the difference between a harmless fascination and a dangerous script being rehearsed.

Ultimately, this research argues that the way we understand violence needs to change. For too long, the focus has been on the "why" of terrorism, assuming that every attacker has a cause. But for a growing number of people, the cause is secondary, or entirely absent. The violence is the point. By recognizing that the script for an attack can form before any ideology is ever adopted, security experts and policymakers can begin to build systems that are sensitive to this new reality. The goal is not to expand the definition of terrorism to include everyone who likes violent movies, but to create a space where the specific, non-ideological drive toward destruction can be seen, understood, and stopped before it turns into a tragedy. The paper concludes with a set of testable ideas, inviting other researchers to check if this model holds up when they look at the files of other cases, the online traces of other attackers, and the statistics of who is being referred to prevention programs. It is a call to look at the seduction of violence itself, rather than just the political masks it sometimes wears.