HOMELAND SECURITY
One Eye Open: Mental health blind spot in counterterror efforts Chief editor Nicholas Dynon writes that established punitive approaches by government to individuals exhibiting lone actor terrorist behaviours are not necessarily making us safer.
Nicholas Dynon is chief editor of Line of Defence Magazine, and a widely published commentator on New Zealand’s defence, national security and private security sectors.
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Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen, the 32-year-old ISIS sympathiser who stabbed six people before being shot dead in an Auckland supermarket on 3rd September is New Zealand’s latest ‘terrorist’. While the terrorist label may fit, history tells us that it’s not particularly helpful. There are, according to various studies, over 200 definitions of terrorism. They are academically contested, often legally convoluted, frequently politically appropriated, sometimes emotively deployed, and inevitably prone to obsolescence. As a rule of thumb, they tend not to be particularly helpful. And New Zealand is no exception to this rule. The Counter-Terrorism Legislation Bill currently before Parliament is seeking to address inadequacies in the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002 (TSA), including amending the legal definition of ‘terrorist act’. According to the Ministry of Justice, terrorism has evolved since the TSA was drafted in the early 2000s. The TSA, it states, “predominantly responds to the threat posed by organised terrorist entities and groups rather than a fuller range of terrorist activities, such as attacks that involve lone actors and low-sophistication.” The ‘fuller range of terrorist activities’, however, is potentially a very long list. Similarly, the ‘terrorist’ label itself encompasses a range of actors that has broadened over time, from terrorist organisations, militant groups and rebel fighters, to violent extremists,
lone actors, radicalised offenders, disgruntled petitioners and fixated persons. In Samsudeen’s case, it would appear that beyond the general categorisation of ‘terrorist’, there is some consensus among commentators that he was a ‘lone wolf ’ or, less pejoratively, a ‘lone actor’. Although we again face the difficulty of multiple contested definitions, lone wolf terrorism may be described as involving a single perpetrator acting without direct support in the planning, preparation and execution of an attack, and whose decision to act is not directed by any group or other individuals. Understanding the LynnMall terrorist as a lone actor is important because research has identified characteristics in relation to this particular category of terrorist that distinguishes it from others, including – importantly – in terms of the role played by mental health. The mental health connection On 15 December 2014, Man Horan Monis held 18 people at gunpoint inside the Lindt café in Sydney, a siege that resulted in the deaths of two captives and Monis himself. It ultimately transpired that Monis was acting independently – a lone actor – and that he had serious mental health problems. A 2015 Study by Corner and Gill of 119 lone actors in Europe and the US found that 32 percent had been diagnosed with a mental illness, whereas organised terrorist groups had a relatively low prevalence of mental
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