Following the knife attack, Westfield Bondi Junction was closed for nearly a week. The silence was eerie for this section of Sydney, normally a restless place, congested with traffic and pedestrians, in one of the busiest parts of the city. It is called Bondi Junction for a reason: the train line terminates here and a large bus exchange takes passengers throughout the rest of the eastern suburbs, including to its famous beach.

Instead of throngs of shoppers and office workers there were silent mourners, some in tears, adding tributes to the growing pile of flowers and cards to acknowledge the senseless deaths of six innocent people on the afternoon of April 13. The shops have reopened but the retail bustle is now more subdued. Many of these people attended a healing vigil that took place at Bondi Beach last Sunday evening, where more tears were shed amid songs, prayers and silent reflection.

People who never met the victims, both those who died and those who survived, will continue to weep. There is talk of establishing a permanent tribute to mark the event. The New South Wales government is considering a more formal commemorative service. The nine-month-old baby who was also stabbed, and whose mother died, has now been discharged from hospital and returned to her family.

The offender, shot dead by police and identified within 24 hours, had recently come from Queensland and had no fixed address. His name might never be uttered by some, in a refusal to dignify his actions, just as former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern swore not to utter that of the Christchurch terrorist who shot dead 51 people in two mosques in March 2019.

Unlike the Christchurch murderer, Joel Cauchi had a documented history of mental health problems, going back to his teenage years. His parents have been open about this, and forthcoming in their grief and sorrow, exposing their unvarnished selves to the media and repeatedly apologising for what their son has done. They contacted NSW Police Force and sent messages of concern and support to the officer who shot Cauchi. His crimes are hardly their fault and their particular anguish can be only imagined.

Within minutes of the reported slaughter, comments posted on social media were claiming this was a mass shooting and a terrorist attack. A lie from a notorious troll naming a local man as the suspect was quickly circulated on platforms such as X and – even more appallingly – repeated by mainstream media without any attempt at verification.

Because Cauchi can never be questioned, conjecture as to his motives will remain. Short of a diary, private manifesto, or correspondence coming to light, everything discussed about this man’s motivations will always be speculative. Instead, mental health issues, particularly schizophrenia, have been cited as the reason he killed. More reasons may unfold as investigations continue, but so far it is agreed the perpetrator of the Bondi stabbings was not motivated by ideology, religion, politics or any form of fanaticism.

Of the theories surrounding the circumstances of the attack, the most persuasive concerns the fact that of the six murdered victims, five were women. On the surface a simple explanation for this could be that a slightly built man, even one in possession of a knife, may have considered male targets to be unviable, females generally being less physically intimidating. The fact that the one person who managed to repel Cauchi was a man, facing him down from the top of an escalator, might support this view.

However, since Cauchi’s father expressed the view that his son lacked a girlfriend, this theory now prevails. “He wanted a girlfriend, and he’s got no social skills,” Andrew Cauchi told reporters, “and he was frustrated out of his brain.” The commissioner of NSW Police Force, Karen Webb, supported this view by pointing out that not only were five out of the six dead victims female but also so were most of the other 12 surviving victims: “It’s obvious to me, it’s obvious to detectives … that the offender had focused on women and avoided the men.”

If this is the work of a man so resentful of women he was determined to kill them at random, there are a lot of implications here, the most significant being that he was taking revenge for experiencing rejection from women. “He wanted a girlfriend … and he was frustrated out of his brain.” See what you made me do.

None of this is news to the millions of women around the world who experience violence at the hands of men, including their intimate partners. These acts of violence, reported in the media with distressing regularity, describe incidents where men systematically stalk, coercively control, intimidate, emotionally abuse, frighten, physically attack, rape, and murder women and, in some cases, also their children. The actions of violent men terrorise the lives of many women, yet these are not considered acts of terrorism.

After the killings, the police were quick to hose down rumours of a terrorist attack and by the next day were emphatically declaring it not to be an act of terrorism. Terrorism, broadly, is defined as the use of intentional violence against innocent people to highlight or achieve political or ideological objectives. At first glance it appears Cauchi had no connection to any organised political or ideological causes and therefore was not a terrorist.

This is in contrast to the perpetrator of a second public act of violence in Sydney, another stabbing that occurred two days later. On April 15 a teenage boy, not named for legal reasons, allegedly attacked Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at an evening service in a breakaway Assyrian church in the Western Sydney suburb of Wakeley. Before the night was out the offence was designated a terrorist act by police, and confirmed by the NSW premier, Chris Minns. Live-streamed, the incident provoked an extraordinary act of mass violence, where an estimated 2000 people stormed the premises ostensibly to defend the bishop after hearing the alleged perpetrator had spoken in Arabic claiming his prophet had been “offended”.

While this person appears to have acted alone, the extreme religious views that seem to have provoked the attack were enough to designate it as terrorism. His victim was a conspicuous and outspoken priest. The Bondi murderer was also a lone-wolf attacker. His victims were conspicuously female.

This crime occurs amid shocking statistics regarding violence against women. In the age of Andrew Tate et al, a female-hating murderous man is not a lone wolf. His ideological views may not have been aired, and may have been barely articulated, even to himself, but he acted in a context in which violence against women is not only tolerated but insidiously enabled.

Here is just one example of this context: on April 15, Erin Pearson reported for The Age on the inquest into the death of Noeline Dalzell, stabbed in the neck by her ex-partner in 2020. Dreadful details of this story include the facts their three teenage children witnessed this crime; police had responded to 27 incidents for this family over the years; Dalzell had not been notified of her ex-partner’s impending release from jail; authorities were aware he would return home and seek revenge; police in the area were aware of 1400 family violence perpetrators, many of them high risk, all of them male.

Domestic violence and intimate partner abuse and murder have not decreased in this country, despite strenuous efforts to expose and confront these crimes, particularly in the wake of #MeToo. Whatever his motives, Cauchi was a product of a society in which, for all the advances made by feminism, misogyny moves constantly under the surface. Outright, hateful violence is a recurring reality for many women.

This is not to deny the state of Cauchi’s mental health. As Queensland Police Service acting Assistant Commissioner Roger Lowe said the day after the Bondi murders, it is “not a crime” to have a mental health problem. “We have people in our society who suffer from mental health. They go about their days without trouble, without causing these type of crimes.”

With so many female victims, however, a mental health episode cannot surely be the entire story. Poor mental health is not a crime, but crimes have undeniably been committed. What is at fault is a system in which complex bureaucratic, geographic and economic factors conspire to rob sufferers of treatment, even at the very basic level. The “system” also failed Noeline Dalzell, in her case the police and justice system. That system can hardly be arrested and put on trial.

As with all public acts of violence now, stories and images of this event will remain to haunt us forever. Most heartbreaking of these stories is that of Ashlee Good, pressing her injured baby onto two strangers and imploring them to care for her when she must have known she was dying. Then there is the fearless man, Damien Guerot, who first wielded a bollard from the top of an escalator to deter the killer, before following Inspector Amy Scott as she chased him. There is the footage of her running directly towards Cauchi. Moments later, after she called her warning, she shot him dead.

Inspector Scott’s bravery is admirable, her actions commendable, the only possible ones given the context, the moment. That she did not shoot to kill is suggested by her equally valiant attempt to administer CPR. We will never know if Cauchi killed because he was desperate for a girlfriend. We will never know if that was the main reason, part of the reason or none of the reason.

These knife attacks were, whichever way you look at them, acts of terror. In Cauchi’s case, this was an incident of intentional violence against innocent people, mainly women. Yet we are still not able to call the perpetrator a terrorist.

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