Days after a bishop was stabbed during a live-streamed church service in Sydney, a group of teenagers, one as young as 14, began plotting a gun massacre targeting the Jewish community. According to police, the boys shared violent fantasies over encrypted chats, discussing how to acquire firearms and whether they preferred to be arrested or die in the act: “I wanna die and I wanna kill,” one 17-year-old messaged. “I’m just excited.”
Now charged with conspiring to carry out a terrorist attack, the teens’ plot is just one example of how fast, and how deeply, children and young people can be radicalized to violent extremism.
Security and intelligence agencies across the Five Eyes nations – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States – are observing a concerning rise in the involvement of children and young people in violent extremism related activities. But why?
We argue that the answer can be found in the distinctive vulnerabilities of youth – a transitional period in life that, together with current structural drivers, provides opportunities for new forms of violent extremism to emerge. This creates an enabling environment where rising numbers of children and young people are radicalizing to violent extremism and mobilizing to commit acts of terrorism. Children and young people are confronted with an unprecedented threat environment, one that is compounded by the rise of fluid and hybrid extremes, beliefs and behaviors that blur the boundaries between ideological forms of extremism, conspiratorial narratives, personal and public grievances, violent misogyny, child sexual abuse, extreme gore and violent subcultures, and even organized crime.
As such, we argue that applying an ideology-centric lens to understand why children and young people engage in violent extremism is ill-suited to countering the current trend. Instead, to effectively respond to the evolving threat landscape, prevention efforts must shift toward a model that addresses the systemic drivers and underlying causes of youth vulnerability to violent extremism.
The Vulnerabilities of Youth
Children and young people can be vulnerable to violent extremism in ways that differ from adults. The transition from childhood to adulthood is an important developmental stage characterized by identity formation, emotional volatility, moral development, and growing independence – a constellation of push and pull factors that have the potential to drive engagement with violent extremism. When young people face uncertainty or lack stable support systems, they may gravitate toward influences that offer clear rules, identity, and meaning. Extremist narratives, particularly those based on rigid us vs. them thinking, can appeal to youth who feel their group identity is threatened or who lack pro-social alternatives. These narratives often provide simplistic explanations for complex problems and promise a sense of purpose and significance.
Social dynamics can further increase vulnerability. Peer influence is especially strong during adolescence, as youth seek external validation and approval. Those with low self-esteem or weak peer connections may turn to extremist communities online, where interaction can become immersive and addictive. These communities offer recognition, status, and group identity – powerful incentives for engagement. The development of gender identity can also play a role. Boys and young men who feel they fall short of societal gender ideals may experience shame and resentment, sometimes channeled into hypermasculine or misogynistic beliefs. Extremist groups often strategically exploit these attitudes, reinforcing harmful gender norms and glorifying male dominance, aggression, and entitlement. These dynamics are evident in the growth of incel communities, where boys and young men channel feelings of rejection into misogynistic worldviews that glorify violence against women and girls. Incel and misogynistic beliefs have already inspired attacks around the world.
Adolescence is further marked by significant neurocognitive developments, including the ongoing maturation of self-regulation. During this time, self-regulation is not fully developed, rendering youth more prone to thrill-seeking, risk-taking, and impulsive behaviors. This can make violent extremist content particularly appealing. For neurodiverse youth, particularly those with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC), traits like focused interests and social communication differences can increase exposure to and engagement with extreme content, especially in unregulated online spaces. More generally, mental health struggles, combined with complex needs such as trauma, bullying, or family dysfunction, can further exacerbate vulnerability. These challenges can impact on emotional regulation and resilience, increasing the appeal of extremist groups that promise meaning, belonging, and power in their otherwise unstable lives.
There is no single “cause” of violent extremism. Instead, a complex mix of push and pull factors, which occur in certain settings and at certain times, creates the conditions conducive to youth vulnerability to violent extremism. In other words, it is the constellation of multiple compounding factors in space (online and offline) and time, that creates vulnerabilities for children and young people. To that end, the vulnerabilities we describe here do not exist in a vacuum, but instead are further compounded and influenced by the unique social context children and young people exist in.
Structural Drivers
Combined with the unique vulnerabilities of youth, the structural and social conditions facing today’s children and young people contribute to environments conducive to violent extremism. Failures in governance – such as political exclusion, corruption, and unresponsive institutions – can erode trust and leave young people feeling alienated and powerless. In environments where young people see limited pathways to participate meaningfully in society, extremist groups can fill the void, offering identity and the illusion of agency. When institutions are seen as unjust, violence can be framed as a legitimate means of change.
Economic hardship, including high youth unemployment and limited educational or career opportunities, can create chronic frustration, especially among marginalized or migrant youth who also face cultural exclusion and discrimination. The intersection of poverty and denied identity can deepen existential crises. Extremist narratives exploit these conditions by offering simple, black-and-white answers to complex problems.
International conflicts and global injustices are often personalized through online spaces, framing distant violence as local grievance. Youth exposed to polarizing debates may feel increasingly pushed out of society, fueling an us vs. them mentality. At the same time, the breakdown of community ties and family stability weakens protective social anchors, leaving youth more vulnerable to extremist influences.
Compounded by the increasing digitalization of children and young people’s lives, the current conditions are unique to the present generation. Online platforms now play a central role in young people’s lives, where we know extremist content spreads quickly through algorithm driven echo chambers and AI tools. Children and young people are increasingly exposed to unregulated online spaces that glorify violence and normalize extremist ideologies. The accessibility of such content lowers the barrier for recruitment and indoctrination.
Together, these systemic drivers foster a landscape in which children and young people are increasingly vulnerable to engagement in extremist violence.
The Emerging Violent Extremist Threat Landscape
Traditionally, the violent extremist threat facing the West centered around discrete and (somewhat) coherent ideologies, like jihadism or far-right extremism. However, today, we are confronted with a more fragmented and fluid landscape. Among children and young people, this is especially visible.
Many extremists no longer adhere to traditional ideologies but instead adopt hybrid or ambiguous narratives that combine elements from different belief systems. These narratives can be linked through shared grievances, symbols, and online communities, and cultivated to target youth specifically, creating a cross-pollination of extremist ideas. This is particularly visible across decentralized online networks such as Terrorgram[1], or the Com[2], where online subcultures such as 764[3] exist. The loosely networked communities borrow aesthetics from accelerationist and cultish groups, such as Order of Nine Angles[4], strategy from organized crime Com groups (such as swotting, doxxing, and sextortion), and bridge the terror-crime nexus through child sexual abuse and inciting offline violence.
While targeting children and young people is not new, the scale and speed enabled by technology has transformed extremist recruitment and dissemination strategies. Digital ecosystems now play a central role in youth engagement in violent extremism. Online, extremist content is purposefully aestheticized and gamified, making violence appear exciting or heroic. Tactics such as live-streamed attacks and gaming-style framing (e.g., first-person shooter views), glamorize mass violence and appeal to young users. The Christchurch shooter, for example, used video game aesthetics to engage a young audience. Extremist messages are also masked as humor through memes or edgy content, making them more acceptable and even appealing to young people. The intentional use of irony and satire desensitizes youth to violence by normalizing extremist views and fostering a sense of belonging within online communities. Over time, this content erodes moral boundaries and can lead to deeper involvement in harmful online communities and the acceptance of violent extremist narratives.
Extremist material online easily crosses physical borders and is shared and adopted by youth on a global scale, contributing to the rise of transnational extremist subcultures. These digital communities promote a shared language and aesthetics, helping young people find identity and validation in extremist spaces. The result is a more complex and borderless threat environment, where local grievances are amplified by global narratives, and youth are increasingly exposed to violent extremism through interconnected online ecosystems.
Conclusion
Taken together, we argue that individual vulnerabilities combined with the unique social context facing today’s young people have created the necessary conditions for increasing youth violent extremism. However, the increasing proportion of young people involved in violence is not just a symptom of the problem, but also a cause, as youth people are actively driving the emergence of new and more violent forms of extremism. In other words, young people’s involvement in today’s threat landscape is not only a danger to themselves, but at scale, it is reshaping the extremist ecosystem, accelerating the emergence of new extremes and lowering the barriers for others to enter radicalizing environments.
To tackle this threat, responses need to move beyond an ideology-centric lens. Rather than simply treating radical beliefs, a more effective and sustainable solution is needed. Such an approach would treat the root causes of youth vulnerability and target the environments that allow extremism to flourish, thereby tackling the multiple causes of the problem. Without such a shift in preventing and countering violent extremism, society runs the risk of children and young people continuing to be drawn into the cycles of harm that deepen and accelerate the terrorism threat.
[1] Terrorgram is a transnational terrorist group that primarily operates on the social media and digital messaging platform Telegram.
[2] The Com is a primarily English speaking, international, online ecosystem comprised of multiple interconnected networks whose members, many of whom are minors, engage in a variety of criminal violations.
[3] 764 is a network of nihilistic violent extremists who engage in criminal conduct in the United States and abroad, seeking to destroy civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations, which often include minors.
[4] The Order of Nine Angles (O9A) is a decentralized, satanic, neo-Nazi organization.
