A government body in the United Kingdom offered hundreds of self-identified "incels", or men who are involuntarily celibate, financial compensation to participate in a survey exploring their behaviors as they relate to violence.
The Home Office's Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE) gave men in the US and UK $20 or £20 in exchange for completing a 40-minute survey exploring incel behaviors, reported the Guardian.
In total, 561 men from the US and the UK took part in the study. Some participants refused to complete the payment intake forms for fear of exposure through the misuse of data collected, and another 126 participants opted to donate the compensation they received to Movember, a men's mental health charity.
An incel refers to an identity held by some men determined by an inability to establish romantic or sexual relationships with women, sometimes giving rise to misogynistic and subsequently violent tendencies.
They have been described as an "emerging risk" in regard to terrorism. Up until March 2022, 77 cases referred to the UK government's Prevent scheme, a program which seeks to stop individuals from engaging in terrorism, were men who fit into the incel identity, according to the Guardian.
Swansea University lecturer Joe Whittaker, a co-leader of the research conducted into incel behavior, acknowledged the issues with paying those associated with hateful behaviors but stated that the broad sample was necessary.
"All of research ethics is about trade-offs between two competing goods. You have this issue of a very hard to reach, difficult to research population. Trying to find a way into that is definitely good," said Whittaker.
"On the other side, I can understand why some people might take some level of objection to this is that some incels are accused, and, in several cases, have done some pretty bad stuff. I'm not just talking about ultraviolence. I'm talking about being, frankly, horrible misogynists," he continued.
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