The Pied Piper of 4chan : Fairy-tale narratives of racist and misogynistic radicalisation in UK elite political discourse

UK political elites increasingly represent racist and misogynistic violence as a problem of ‘radicalisation’ in which, like the Pied Piper luring the children of Hamelin, predatory online ‘radicalisers’ lure and brainwash susceptible youth. This article examines how this narrative achieves dominance despite the availability of empirically grounded alternatives, asking what role narrative form plays in its success. Through a narrative analysis of UK counterterrorism policies and parliamentary statements, it reconstructs the narrative’s setting, characterisation and emplotment, demonstrating significant resemblances with several popular fairy tales. The article argues that this intertextual resonance with culturally embedded story forms lends the ‘radicalisation’ narrative a familiarity and coherence that alternative narratives – which foreground the everyday settings, adult perpetrators and structural persistence of these harms – lack. The article concludes by suggesting that contesting the ‘radicalisation’ narrative’s dominance requires telling counter-stories of comparable verisimilitude rather than simply assembling better evidence.