Home Grown

Quercus 320pp £16.99

The Week Bookshop £13.99

“Gallons of ink have already been spilled” on the question of what turns people into terrorists, said Raffaello Pantucci in the Literary Review. In her “stimulating” new book, Joan Smith presents a novel take on the issue. Instead of seeking economic, ideological and geopolitical explanations, we should, she argues, pay more attention to domestic violence. Her basic point is that if you dig into the background of virtually any male terrorist – whether of an Islamist or far-right persuasion – you’re likely to find a life story littered with “abuse at home” and “misogynistic behaviours”. Smith marshals an impressive array of evidence in support of this thesis, said Decca Aitkenhead in The Sunday Times. In a “crisp, cool tone”, she documents a “sickening” array of gendered violence – from the 2016 Bastille Day attacker in Nice, who used to urinate on his wife’s feet, to the 2014 café-siege terrorist in Sydney, who had been charged as an accessory to the murder of one of his ex-wives. Smith is rightly incredulous that such links haven’t been discussed more, and that they have been widely ignored by the security services. Understanding the “close link between private and public violence”, she writes, would provide a “new way” of identifying potential terrorists.

While Smith is right to highlight the connections between terrorism and misogyny, she comes close to making toxic masculinity a “catch-all explanation”, said Edward Lucas in The Times. She skates over other factors in violence – notably, heavy cannabis use – and fails to “fully deal with the fact that women can also be terrorists”. Above all, she is surely wrong in her opening contention: that terrorism is the “scourge of her age”. In fact, other things matter far more – not least the “unpunished domestic violence” she so rightly abhors.