The horrific events of last night, during which passengers were trapped on a train between stations in Cambridgeshire while blood-soaked stabbing victims staggered past, are almost too horrible to contemplate. Two men have been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, while two people remain in hospital in “life-threatening” condition.

Naturally, the public is desperate to learn more details. Yet what we heard at a press conference this morning makes no sense at all. “At this stage,” Superintendent John Loveless of British Transport Police declared, “there is nothing to suggest that this is a terrorist incident.” A similar announcement was made after the Southport knife attacks in July last year, which took the lives of three young girls and injured many others.

Many people have rightly expressed astonishment at these conclusions. They are the result of an absolutely basic mistake in the authorities’ current approach to terrorism, which focuses on ideology rather than outcomes. It means that two almost identical attacks on strangers will be categorised quite differently.

Attackers who declare themselves followers of Islamic State will be treated as terrorists, while men who have a history of being obsessed with knives, beheadings and the most gruesome violence will not. The impact on victims and their families will be the same, which renders such hair-splitting all but meaningless.

But it’s worse than that: a narrow definition of terrorism means that some very dangerous men who come to the attention of the authorities don’t get stopped. The prime example is Axel Rudakubana, the teenager convicted of the Southport attacks, who was referred to the Prevent counter-terrorism programme on three occasions.

Then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told the House of Commons in January that “multiple different agencies were in contact with Rudakubana and knew about his history of violence”. He was known to have “a sickening and sustained interest in death and violence” and admitted to carrying knives.

The reason for closing investigations into such a dangerous young man is telling. A review of Rudakubana’s involvement with Counter-Terrorism Policing (CTP) concluded that “too much weight was placed on the absence of ideology […] or taking account of whether he was obsessed with massacre or extreme violence.”

What this reflects is a traditional but arguably mistaken view of the aetiology of terrorism. It overstates the significance of ideology, which is often a relatively late arrival in the history of men who go on to commit mass-casualty attacks. They seek out “causes” — Islamism, Right-wing ideology, antisemitism — to “justify” attacking innocent people, concealing the fact that the underlying motivation is an obsession with extreme violence. Survivors often describe the zombie-like expressions of their attackers, who are so focused on creating carnage that they show not a shred of compassion.

Many of these perpetrators begin by attacking their wives and partners, which puts misogyny very much in the mix. After my book about the connection between domestic violence and terrorism was published in 2019, I worked with CTP on a project analysing the backgrounds of suspects referred to Prevent. Around 40% had a history of domestic violence, compared to roughly 5% of the general population.

Terrorism is fundamentally a manifestation of male violence. Violent men who don’t have a clearly identifiable ideology are as dangerous as those who do. As heroic stories emerge from the train attacks last night, the definition of terrorism should be expanded to cover a cohort of men radicalised by an obsession with violence.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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