The Australian-born terrorist behind the Christchurch mosque shootings was openly racist at school, experienced family violence at home and had unsupervised access to the internet from childhood.
These details about Brenton Tarrant’s early life were revealed last week in a report by the New Zealand Royal Commission of Inquiry into the 2019 terrorism attack in which 51 people were murdered.
The inquiry found Tarrant, who grew up in Grafton in northern NSW, “began expressing racist ideas from a young age” including referring to his mother’s then partner’s Aboriginal ancestry. Grafton is a town of 19,000, with an Indigenous population of about 10 per cent.
At high school, one of his teachers, who was also the Anti-Racism Contact Officer, dealt with Tarrant twice over anti-Semitism. This teacher described the individual as “disengaged in class to the point of quiet arrogance, but also well-read and knowledgeable, particularly on certain topics such as the Second World War”.
While no one could have known Tarrant would grow up to commit mass murder, experts say racist commentary is a red flag for violence.
Mark Briskey, a senior lecturer in criminology at Murdoch University in Perth, said Australia needed to grapple with the correlation between racism and violence.
“There are different forms of violence from people who are quite willing to abuse someone racially on a bus or on the train to those willing to go and cut a pig’s head off and throw it in a mosque to those who will firebomb cars,” Mr Briskey said.
Read the article by Caitlin Fitzsimmons in the Brisbane Times.