IT is every parent’s worst nightmare that their child will go off the rails in their school years.
But Laurence Wheatley and wife Joanne must have thought their job was done when they saw middle son Sam off to university.
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A well-behaved student and outstanding athlete, Sam looked destined to succeed.
However, 150 miles away from the cosy family home in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, Sam was starting to dabble in the dangerous world of incels.
The word “incels” comes from “involuntary celibates” and refers to a group of young men active online who lash out at women for denying them sex and oppressing them.
At Birmingham University, Sam, 22, began devoting hours to making videos about the subculture — linked to hate speech and sexual violence — and eventually dropped out of his studies.
Posting on YouTube, he now spews out conspiracy theories about how women and society are to blame for men missing out on relationships.
In one disturbing video, Wheatley says men with “zero value” are more likely to rape.
In another he goes on to Birmingham University campus to ask female students to rate men’s looks in an effort to back up his claims that women only care about looks.
Dad Laurence, 71, who deplores his son’s sexist views, is exasperated.
He told The Sun: “I’ve heard some of his rubbish and I think it’s crap.
“Do you ever listen to any of his stuff? I haven’t listened to it in a few years now, half of it is misogynistic.
“I don’t know where he’s got all this from, I don’t know why, it’s mad.”
Laurence, a retired pet grooming boss, became even more worried when he found out his son, who has an older sister and younger brother, flew to the US to get advice from a fellow incel.
‘School shooting mentality’
He said: “Sam is always making these silly programmes and he gets money for it. The idea is they get a following.
“He speaks to this bloke in America about it, they’ve got a thing going, he’s been out there.
“You can get in trouble for this stuff, I’ve told him before it should stop.
“There’s other people getting in trouble for this like the Tate brothers — what a load of crap they come out with.”
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Incels have been thrust back into the spotlight this week after an Australian man stabbed six people to death in a busy Sydney shopping centre.
Cops are probing possible links to the incel movement after attacker Joel Cauchi targeted women.
His only male victim was a security guard.
Joel’s dad Andrew blamed the killings on his son’s frustration at not having a girlfriend.
Britain witnessed an incel attack in 2021 when loner Jake Davison, 22, shot dead five people, including his mum Maxine, 51, a three-year-old girl and her dad.
Davison, of Plymouth, then turned the legally-owned pump-action shotgun on himself.
He had previously posted a rambling YouTube video describing himself as a “f***ing fat ugly virgin” and boasted about being a “Terminator” before his killing spree.
I’ve heard some of his rubbish and I think it’s crap. I don’t know where he’s got all this from, I
don’t know why, it’s madSam Wheatley’s dad Laurence
Laurence said: “It is dangerous the way it influences people. You get these nutcases like you did in Australia.
“Sam has stopped doing one of his channels. He’s living in Birmingham now. He’s trying to do college. He dropped out previously and he’s trying to do it again.”
The Sun can today reveal that kids as young as 12 are being drawn into the incel movement.
One expert said children are joining online forums, as some of the words used by incels make their way into mainstream culture.
Incels are on the dark side of the “manosphere” — toxic online communities where men blame women for world problems.
At one extreme is self-proclaimed woman-hater Andrew Tate, 37, who with his brother Tristan, 35, faces charges of human trafficking, rape and organised crime in Romania.
The pair then face being extradited to the UK on further accusations of rape and sexual assault.
Incels buy into a theory that men are oppressed and their power has been taken away by feminists.
They claim to have lost the “genetic lottery” and that there is nothing they can ever do to improve their lives or attract women because they will always lose out to good-looking men they call “Chads”.
Research by Dr Lewis Brace, an extremism researcher at the University of Exeter, says at its most extreme, followers can develop a “school shooting” mentality.
He said: “There is more and more of this content online and some aspects, such as words like Chads, are sort of seeping into the mainstream.
“It means boys aged 12 and upwards are engaging with this content early on because it’s an ideology pretty much designed to target people that age — going through puberty, socialisation, working out who they are.”
Dr Brace said most kids end up disengaging naturally but a core group remain incels.
He added: “This ideology becomes a way of framing and understanding their world and they can hit this point, normally in their early 20s, which is when most incels carry out attacks, where their logic is so nihilistic they deem there’s no way out of their situation.
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“They’re not trying to change anything. They’re trying to get revenge or find a release and that’s more in that ‘school shooter’ than ‘terrorism’ sphere.
“Incel attackers will always either commit suicide or attempt to commit suicide at the end of their attacks.”
One of the worst incel attacks took place in Toronto, Canada, in 2018 when Alek Minassian, then 28, killed 11 people when he ploughed a rented van into a busy street.
He was jailed for life in June 2022. Growing numbers of young Brits are being referred to the Government’s Prevent terrorism scheme over the ideology.
Statistics show that in the year to March 2022, 77 males were referred, compared to three the year before.
Sam Wheatley has more than 153,000 followers on two YouTube channels we have chosen not to name.
‘Thinking errors’
He claims not to be a “blackpill” incel — one of the most extreme — and has had girlfriends in the past, but still pushes twisted content.
He has clips that promote the idea women reject men who are not good-looking.
In one video labelled The Dark Future: Why 90% Of Men Will Be Invisible In 5 Years, Wheatley gathers statistics which, he claims, “all point towards dating being more unequal”.
A message reads: “Gone are the days when every man had a chance and in with the days when the top 20 per cent of men prevail.”
In another clip, called The Consequences Of Sexlessness Are Scary, he says men who rape women appear to be those with “zero options”.
He says: “It appears the only people who steal are those who have nothing . . . similarly, in the dynamics between men and women, it appears the only people who steal are the men who have zero value and zero options.
“A quick Google search of men convicted of the R-word (rape) shows pretty much every one of them is in the bottom five per cent of attractiveness.
“Once more, it paints a picture that the lower value the man, the less options he has, the more likely he is to take and force getting what he desires.”
Wheatley even runs a service to rate other men’s looks on a scale of one to ten.
Dr Andrew Thomas is an evolutionary psychologist at Swansea University.
In a report funded by the Commission for Countering Extremism, he found that one in three men who belonged to the incel subculture had thought about killing themselves every day for at least a fortnight.
It also found that incels are more likely to be neurodivergent and have difficulties such as autism.
He says mental health interventions are key to helping them.
They believe the world is never going to change, that things are always going to be awful for them
Dr Andrew Thomas
Dr Thomas said: “We found that a fifth of these guys met the cut-off point used by the medical profession for anxiety and depression.
“A lot have patterns of thinking which we would label as black and white and catastrophise the future.
“They believe the world is never going to change, that things are always going to be awful for them. These are types of thinking errors.
“If we take away the label of incel for a second and just think of them as young men who feel like they have no mating prospects and feel excluded from relationships and have bad feelings towards themselves and others.
“Those types of men have existed for hundreds of thousands of years and will for hundreds of thousands of years to come.
Read more on the Scottish Sun
“There will always be a section of society excluded from those (relationship) experiences.
“What is different right now is that it’s easier for them to find each other online and build that sense of community.”
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‘Sex is not a right’
By Julie Bindel
THE world of incels is growing fast – and it is terrifying.
Boys are being taught to have a sense of sexual entitlement that goes way beyond anything even I have seen in my 40-plus years of campaigning to end male violence towards women and girls.
The idea that boys are given permission to feel angry and violent towards women and girls that don’t provide sexual services on demand is horrific.
These boys are tomorrow’s sex buyers.
They will grow into men that bypass developing normal, healthy relationships with women and instead purchase exactly what they want, when they want, whether or not the woman is consenting.
They are being told that they have a “right” to sex, and if they can’t get a woman to do their bidding consensually, they will simply take what they want.
This isn’t just about boys and men sitting online in the basement, but also groups in poker clubs, bars and football teams that give each other permission to behave in this appalling way.
Sex is not a human right, and yet incels are normalising the notion that women and girls should give them exactly what they want.
Often, when I publish articles condemning men for perpetrating acts of violence against females, I get angry emails from incels threatening rape and murder.
They tell me that if women were not so uptight then they would not “have to” take what they believe is rightfully theirs.
These men are being groomed into a culture of misogyny that should terrify us all.
Hate preachers should be arrested for incitement to crime, and internet providers need to be on the lookout for dangerous content.
It is time that our Government, police forces and child protection agencies do something to prevent these boys and young men being caught up in such a dangerous ideology.