French prosecutors are alarmed at an increasing number of young teenage boys seemingly plotting "terror" attacks, and say they all share an addiction to violent videos online.
As communities worldwide worry about boys being exposed to toxic and misogynistic influences on social media, French magistrates say they are looking into what draws young teens into "terrorism".
"Just a few years ago, there were just a handful of minors charged with terror offences," France's National Anti-Terror Prosecutor's Office (PNAT) said.
"But we had 15 in 2013, 18 in 2024 and we already had 11 by 1 July" this year.
They are aged 13 to 18 and hail from all over France, the PNAT said.
Lawyers and magistrates said these teens are usually boys with no delinquent past, many of whom are introverts or have had family trouble.
The PNAT opened a special branch in May to better examine the profiles of minors drawn into "terrorism", but it said it has already noticed they are all "great users of social media".
"Most are fans of ultra-violent, war or pornographic content," it said.
In France, "terrorism" is largely synonymous with extremist Islamist ideas such as those of the Islamic State jihadist group.
Only in recent months has the PNAT taken on cases different in nature - in one case an adult suspected of a racist far-right killing, and the other an 18-year-old charged with developing a misogynist plot to kill women.
In one recent case, the 14-year-old schoolboy who stabbed a teaching assistant to death in June was a fan of "violent video games", although his case was not deemed "terrorist" in nature.
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'Proving themselves...'
In the case of France's youngest "terror" suspects, a judicial source told French news agency AFP, social media provides them with a flow of violent videos that are "not necessarily linked to terrorism", such as from Latin American cartels.
"They think they're proving themselves as men by watching them," the source said.
Sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar said the teens were "neither children nor adults".
This "leads them to violence in order to be recognised as adults - even if it's a negative adult," he said.
Laurene Renaut, a researcher looking into jihadist circles online, said social media algorithms could suck adolescents in fast.
"In less that three hours on TikTok, you can find yourself in an algorithm bubble dedicated to the Islamic State" group, she said.
You can be bathing in "war chants, decapitations, AI reconstructions of glorious (according to IS) past actions or even simulations of actions to come," she said.
The algorithms feed users "melancholic" content to boost their "feeling of loneliness, with ravaged landscapes, supposed to reflect the soul," she said.
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'Injustice'
In one such case, a teenager claimed he was driven by a sense of "injustice" after watching a video online of a brutal attack on a mosque in New Zealand.
The footage depicted the massacre carried out by white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, who, in March 2019, embarked on a deadly rampage through mosques in Christchurch in New Zealand killing 51 worshippers in what remains the deadliest mass shooting in New Zealand’s modern history.
“Someone sent me Tarrant’s video,” the teenager recalled. “It felt deeply unjust to watch men, women and children being slaughtered.”
Ultimately, he was convicted of plotting terrorist attacks targeting far-right bars.
He told investigators that his path towards extremism began at the age of 13, while playing the video game Minecraft and engaging with others on the gaming platform Discord.
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In July 2024, a French appeals court sentenced him to four years in prison, with two of those years suspended, after he attempted to contact an undercover officer to inquire about acquiring weapons.
The court acknowledged the serious nature of his planned actions but also noted the absence of any deeply rooted ideological radicalisation.
Rather, it concluded that he was the product of a violent upbringing, the child of warring parents in a troubled neighbourhood, significantly deprived of affection and desperate to fit in with online communities.
His lawyer, Jean-Baptiste Riolacci, told the French news agency AFP that his client was "a fundamentally lonely, sad and kind boy, whose only pastime beyond his computer was riding around aimlessly on his scooter."
'Guesswork'
The judicial source, who spoke anonymously due to the sensitivity of the issue, said the French system favours early intervention through charging youth for associating with "terrorist" criminals, and then adapting their punishment according to the severity of the accusations.
But attorney Pierre-Henri Baert, who defended another teenager, said the system did not work.
His client was handed three years behind bars in May for sharing an IS propaganda post calling for attacks against Jewish people as a 16-year-old.
"It's a very harsh sentence considering his very young age, the fact he had no (criminal) record, and was really in the end just accused of statements online," he said.
Another lawyer, who worked on similar cases but asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the issue, agreed.
"When the judiciary goes after people for terrorist criminal association, it's basically doing guesswork," she said, adding that the "terrorist" label could be very stigmatising.
"There's no differentiation between a kid who sent aggressive messages and a suspect who actually bought weapons," she added.
'Fantasising about jihadism'
Two judicial sources said teens prosecuted for alleged "terrorism" are usually only spotted through their behaviour on social media.
They are then charged over other actions, such as moving to an encrypted messaging app, sharing recipes to make explosives or looking for funding, the sources said.
A Paris court will try three teenagers in September, aged 14 and 15, for allegedly planning to blow up a truck outside the Israeli embassy in Belgium.
They had been spotted at high school for their "radical remarks", but were then found in a park with "bottles of hydrochloric acid" containing "aluminium foil", a homemade type of explosive, the PNAT said.
Their telephones showed they had watched videos of massacres.
Jennifer Cambla, a lawyer who represents one of the defendants, said accusations against her client were disproportionate.
"My client may have had the behaviour of a radicalised person by consulting jihadist websites, which is forbidden. But he is far from having plotted an attack," she said.
But another lawyer, speaking anonymously, said arresting teenagers "fantasizing about jihadism" could be an opportunity to turn their lives around - even if it involved "a monstruous shock".
"The arrests are tough," with specialised forces in ski masks pulling sacks over the suspect's head, they said.
But "as minors, they are followed closely, they see therapists. They are not allowed on social media, and they do sport again," the lawyer said.
One of the judicial sources warned it was not clear that this worked.
It "makes it look like they are being rapidly deradicalised, but we do not know if these youth could again be drawn in by extremist ideas," they said.
(AFP)
