This study examined risk and protective factors affecting the path to radicalization.
Understanding the pathways that lead to politically and/or religiously motivated violence or terrorism remains a pressing concern. Despite extraordinary commitment and effort to better understand the threat of terrorism and respond more effectively to it, there is considerable empirical evidence that domestic terrorists continue to pose a significant danger to public safety. This project is the first study to comparatively examine the presence/absence of risk and protective factors across three groups: (i) extremist individuals who committed ideologically motivated violent (fatal and non-fatal violent attacks) and nonviolent (financial) crimes, (ii) extremists who did not break the law and only engaged in legal extremist activities, and (iii) persons who committed non-ideological motivated homicides and other violent attacks. In addition, the project is methodologically unique in that although case-control is widely used to study public health and medical problems, no prior study has used this approach to compare violent and nonviolent criminal extremists to nonoffending extremists and regular violent offenders. Although there has been a good amount of radicalization and risk assessment-related research on risk and protective factors, the researchers in this project expand this work with comparative analyses that have not been previously explored, comparing violent or nonviolent criminal extremists to nonoffending extremists or other types of violent offenders. The case-control approach used in this project provides an empirically robust understanding of categorical differences across groups that have not yet been achieved.