Whenever a horrifying atrocity takes place, there is a natural inclination to know who did it and why. With the Southport massacre last summer, a section of the Right immediately seized on the rumour that the then-unnamed Axel Rudakubana was a Muslim migrant, while another on the Left seized on the conspiracists to spread a moral panic about the far-Right.

Then, in October last year, Rudakubana shapeshifted into a jihadi terrorist. Following his conviction last week, he morphed once again into someone who had no ideological motive. However, this week there was another evolution. According to Mail Online, “Axel Rudakubana may have targeted girls at Taylor Swift dance due to ‘incel’ hatred of women.” The sole piece of evidence for this was a quotation which had appeared in a recent article in the Sunday Times: “He [Rudakubana] never spoke to girls. When my mates saw the attack they guessed it was because he was […] like an incel.”

But here’s another quote from that same article in the Sunday Times: “Police say there is no evidence Rudakubana was an incel.” Despite this lack of evidence, some feminists are convinced about the misogynistic roots of the Southport killer’s rage. “I think the ideological motive is pretty clear,” wrote one scholar on X, citing another report from a week ago in the Times which mentioned one of Rudakubana’s female schoolmates remembering “how a look would flash across his face whenever the topic of women’s rights came up in class”.

The same report is cited in an X thread by the Women’s Rights Network (WRN), which noted that “Rudakubana attacked young girls” and that he isn’t alone among terrorists in his choice of target. By way of substantiation, the WRN refers to Salman Abedi, who in 2017 carried out a suicide bombing at Manchester Arena, and an Isis-K plot to attack a Taylor Swift concert in Austria last August: “What do these concert audiences have in common? Young females.”

While it’s true that most of Abedi’s 22 murder victims were indeed women, it doesn’t follow from this that his motive was a hatred of women. Rather, and based on what we know about Abedi and his allegiance to Isis, his victims were chosen primarily because they were unbelievers and because they were “soft targets” whose butchering would draw maximum publicity to the Islamist cause.

To avoid any misunderstanding here, it’s worth clarifying that the WRN is absolutely right to address the matter of Rudakubana’s target selection. Why did he target those girls at that particular event? Unfortunately, Rudakubana has refused to speak about his atrocity, so nobody knows for certain. Perhaps he did harbour a deep loathing and resentment towards women and girls and wanted to violently punish them. But it’s worth noting that misogyny is extremely difficult to prove. In the cases of Jake Davison’s shooting rampage in Plymouth in 2021 and Joel Cauchi’s stabbing spree at a shopping outlet in Sydney last April, the motives for both massacres remain unclear and have never been firmly established.

It’s also eminently possible that Rudakubana targeted very young girls because they were acutely vulnerable and he could — as someone physically slight himself — maximise causalities; because he knew it would generate maximum revulsion and infamy; or because, for all we know, he decided that those girls were a sacrificial gift to the voice in his head.

A curious mind would entertain all of these possibilities and more, but instead the WRN speculates that misogyny is the prime motivator and calls for the anticipated public inquiry into the Southport massacre to investigate “the extent to which misogyny is motivating terrorism in the UK”. This is of a piece with a Home Office-ordered report leaked earlier this week, calling for the Government’s counter-extremism strategy to shift away from ideology and narrow its focus on “behaviours of concern” such as violence against women and participation in the online manosphere, which promotes misogyny and hostility to feminism.

Motive-hunting, as Coleridge called it, is an all-too-human endeavour, especially in the aftermath of an atrocity: we want to know the why. But it has also become a highly politicised game, where the whole purpose of the hunt is to dig up a motive that best suits one’s biases. Unfortunately, the case of Rudakubana is no different.