Drawn to darkness

Dana was on the phone scheduling an appointment for her 14-year-old son Elliott when her daughter walked in from school, unzipped her backpack, and pulled out a hunting knife.

It had the word Death engraved on its blade and a gut hook for cleaning out entrails. She had found it in her brother’s room.

Suddenly, Dana couldn’t breathe.

Elliott’s mental health had been declining for months. Just a few days before, he had screamed at her when she took his phone away. Dana recognized some of his ranting as neo-Nazi talking points—and their family is Jewish.

Later, she checked his screen time and found he’d been spending all day on his phone, despite her parental controls. But she couldn’t tell where he’d been. His search data was somehow wiped out.

One website that still appeared in his history: a site showing violent gore videos.

Now this.

Dana’s mind reeled. Elliott was still at school, and she needed to leave in five minutes to pick him up. But now she didn’t know whether she should take him to the hospital or call the police. “Does he have a weapon on him right now?” she wondered frantically. Did he have a plan to harm himself—or any of his classmates?

School violence and mass shootings have become an agonizingly routine American headline over the past decades. So much so that in 2021, the FBI named the risk from lone offenders, often radicalized online, as the greatest terrorist threat confronting the United States.

No one knows who will mobilize to violence or where the next attacker will strike. It’s a growing danger leaving law enforcement scrambling to bring perpetrators to justice and protect children from harm.

Children like Elliott’s classmates. And children like Elliott.

Dana knew she would do whatever it took to save her son before he hurt himself or someone else. But she didn’t realize then how much she would have to do alone—battling uphill as therapists, police, social workers, and nurses dismissed her concerns and failed to grasp the gravity of the situation.

Her fight parallels the crisis facing our nation: a vast chasm between the fast-expanding threat of dark and dangerous internet subcultures and the resources available to help teenagers break free.

DURING THE PREVIOUS SIX MONTHS, Dana had watched Elliott with growing concern. (WORLD agreed not to use Elliott’s real name or the family’s last name to protect their safety.) He was in ninth grade and having a rough time. His first girlfriend broke up with him. His tight-knit friend group fell apart. And Dana and her husband were going through a divorce.

Elliott started to spiral.

One night, he showed Dana a small scratch. He was self-harming. Dana immediately got on the phone with Elliott’s therapist and pediatrician, but they didn’t seem very concerned. They directed her to keep her son on antidepressants and continue therapy.

Soon after, Dana noticed some concerning internet searches, including pornography. She also caught Elliott getting his phone off the family charging station and taking it into his bedroom—something she didn’t allow.

But whenever Dana reached out for help, people seemed to be normalizing the behavior: “This is what kids do now. They’re all online … They’re all depressed. They’re all self-harming.”

Dana didn’t buy that. But she didn’t know what else to do, except stay vigilant and lock up all the knives and razors in the house.

Still, the situation kept worsening. By November 2023, Dana felt like she was watching her son commit suicide in slow motion. Elliott had always loved music. But now he stopped practicing his drums altogether. He started listening to black metal music and wearing “corpse paint”—heavy white makeup with dark circles around his eyes.

His grades started slipping, and he spent every lunch period alone.

Elliott also started repeating a bizarre mashup of extreme left- and right-wing rhetoric. “He would come up to me, look like he was hypnotized, and just start spouting off talking points,” Dana recalled.

One day, in desperation, Dana googled: “What do I do if my kid’s being radicalized online?” An organization called Parents for Peace popped up. Staff there work with families affected by ideological extremism.

Dana called the helpline.

RADICALIZATION IS FUNDAMENTALLY A COGNITIVE PROCESS, something that happens in the mind as a person adopts violent extremist beliefs, according to Bettina Rottweiler, a research associate with the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center. She said radicalization is distinct from mobilization—the moment someone moves beyond thinking and decides to carry out an attack or hurt themselves.

Radicalization often happens behind closed doors, making it impossible to know the true scope of the problem. But existing metrics suggest this is a significant and growing threat.

In 2024, law enforcement from the Five Eyes intelligence allies—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States—released a joint statement reporting an uptick in youth getting mixed up in terrorism cases.

One big reason: the rise of the internet and social media.

Youth radicalization wouldn’t happen if teens weren’t already vulnerable, Rottweiler said. But screens are an enabling factor, exposing children to more dangerous content and bad actors than ever before.

“Before, they went to the playground,” Rottweiler said. Now, parents often have no clue what their kids are watching or who they are talking to online. And that opens the door wide to exploitation.

Even experts don’t know how to predict who will make the jump from radicalization to mobilization. Rottweiler calls that the million-dollar question in counterterrorism. But, once someone mobilizes, the warning signs are easier to spot.

A person totally withdraws from the outside world. He or she stops participating in activities they used to enjoy. And they grow increasingly secretive about screen time.

After that, things can escalate quickly.

Dana called the Parents for Peace helpline after weekday business hours. Early Monday morning, she got a call back. Dana explained the situation, and the staffer on the line urged her to take immediate action. As soon as she got off the phone, Dana sent a final SOS to Elliott’s therapist. “My kid needs help right now,” she wrote. “Something needs to happen today.”

“We’ll talk about it in our session this week,” Dana recalled the therapist’s response.

After that, Dana spent the day emailing every in-network therapist she could find. She was on the phone trying to schedule an appointment when her daughter walked in with the hunting knife she’d found in Elliott’s room.

The director of the behavioral health department told her to take Elliott straight to the hospital. As Dana sped toward the school, the director got her on a three-way call with 911. She told Dana to stall until the police arrived and then ask for an escort.

But when the police pulled up, Dana said, they refused to even search Elliott. They told her it was a liability issue. “He’s saying he’s not a harm to himself or others,” Dana recalled them saying. “So there’s nothing we can do.”

Emergency room staff told her the same thing, but Dana refused to back down.

After hours of negotiation, they finally agreed to transport Elliott to another hospital. He arrived there just after 1 a.m. By that time, Dana had racked up over 30 phone calls to police, administrators, therapists, and doctors. But except for Parents for Peace staff, almost no one seemed to know what to do with Elliott.

ABOUT 6:30 THE NEXT MORNING, Dana’s phone rang. It was a detective with the police school violence unit, and she had lots of questions about Elliott: How did he dress? Was he a gamer? What did he watch online? What music did he like?

The detective told Dana her son had likely been targeted by a predatory online group called 764. “They target kids,” she said. “They get them to commit school violence, self-harm, and suicide.”

Last year, the FBI started using the label “nihilistic violent extremist,” or NVE, to describe the emerging threat of online groups like 764. Jon Lewis, a research fellow with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, explained these aren’t structured terrorist organizations like ISIS or al-Qaeda. They’re loosely affiliated online ecosystems sowing chaos and hatred.

“It’s barely rooted in any coherent ideology,” he added. “It’s violence for the sake of violence.” According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the number of radicalized young people without ties to established terrorist groups has increased over 300% the past decade. Some of these are school shooters with ties to NVE subcultures, Lewis said. Examples include the shootings at Abundant Life Christian School in Wisconsin, Antioch High School in Tennessee, and Annunciation Catholic Church in Minnesota.

Law enforcement say it’s a threat unlike anything they’ve dealt with before. Since there isn’t a domestic terrorism statute, police have to rely on lower-level charges to put NVEs behind bars. And that means they typically get out of prison in just a few years. “It really is a ticking time bomb,” Lewis said.

Often, NVE perpetrators are other teenagers—and many started as victims themselves. They lurk on gaming platforms like Minecraft and Roblox and prey on younger kids struggling with mental health issues. Because of that, Lewis said, terrorism isn’t the most fitting descriptor of what’s really going on. “It’s grooming,” he said. “It’s abuse. It’s violence against children.”

A few days before Elliott’s hospitalization, Dana noticed a new text on his phone from a number she didn’t recognize. Someone calling himself “Charlie” asked why Elliott had missed his “audition.”

When Dana asked Elliott about the text, he pretended he didn’t know anything. But the police detective told her it might have been a missed contact from someone nefarious. She promised to contact the FBI and said they would need to get into Elliott’s phone.

On her next hospital visit, Dana sat down across from her son and tried to convince him to share his password. Elliott had already refused to tell her over the phone, and now he sat there reciting a jumbled mixture of conspiracy theories. As Dana looked into her son’s eyes, she hardly recognized him.

“Am I sitting across from the Unabomber?” she wondered. “Who is this kid?”

Eventually, Elliott agreed to give his mom his password. About a week later, an FBI agent sat down with Dana and her son’s phone. Elliott had learned how to hide his search history and circumvent her parental controls. Now the agent showed Dana what he had really been looking at.

“I had nightmares for a year from a handful of thumbnails,” Dana said. Her son had been spending 12 to 14 hours daily watching beheadings, security footage of murders, and AI-generated rape videos.

Elliott had also taken hundreds of self-harm child pornography images. His camera roll started with pictures of him displaying a small scratch. But, by the end, he was taking pictures of himself fully naked with every inch of his torso, thighs, and shoulders covered in gashes and etched with satanic symbols—some deep enough to cause permanent scars.

And the day Dana took Elliott to the hospital, he had spent the entire school day on his Chromebook researching how to kill himself.

ALLIZANDRA HERBERHOLD is an exit interventionist with Parents for Peace. She handles many of the NVE cases like Elliott’s.

Herberhold said Parents for Peace gets lots of calls from people afraid loved ones are radicalized—especially around election season. But she said radicalization is a lot more than supporting a different political party. She describes it as an “unwavering, deeply held belief that is a call to action for violence.”

Herberhold said most people also assume radicalization is a symptom of mental illness. “It’s not at all,” she said. The people she works with may battle some depression or anxiety. “But they’re not schizophrenic. They’re not bipolar. They’re not having delusions,” she said.

Instead, Herberhold traces the problem to something far more common: loneliness.

Herberhold describes the teens she meets with as naïve and vulnerable. They don’t have a stable sense of self and are desperate to belong somewhere—even if somewhere is a toxic online group. Many also have autism, which she said makes them especially susceptible to grooming.

Minors Herberhold works with also have a long history of watching violent porn and gore online. Often, they get exposed to explicit content when they are in elementary school. Then they start seeking out increasingly horrific media, chasing an adrenaline rush. “It gets burned into your brain,” Herberhold said. “You become desensitized.”

Joni Johnston is a forensic psychologist and private investigator who’s worked with violent offenders for over three decades. She said it’s important for people to move beyond blaming the internet for youth radicalization and understand why teenagers are seeking out extreme content.

“Happy kids aren’t stumbling on these sites and then being radicalized,” Johnston said. They are already struggling with difficult experiences and broken relationships and want to know: “Does anybody else feel like I do?”

By the time families find Parents for Peace, they are usually in crisis. They don’t have time to sit around and ponder how their child became radicalized, Herberhold said. Instead, she focuses on giving them action steps for moving forward. Usually, the first step is cutting off internet access.

Herberhold said trying to argue ideology out of someone just doesn’t work. You have to help teenagers reconnect with their communities and build a better life so they don’t want the ideology anymore.

But there’s a caveat, Herberhold said. People have to want to change. Otherwise, they won’t. In those cases, she tries to mitigate the threat an individual poses to others. “You can believe what you want,” Herberhold said. “But you can’t hurt other people.”

Every day Elliott stayed at the mental hospital, Dana got a call from staff trying to send him home. Meanwhile, a rumor spread among the other patients that Elliott had belonged to a “death cult.” People were whispering about him, and even some nurses started asking him pointed questions, Dana said.

Elliott was scared. He told his mom he wanted to come home.

He told her something else, too. Dana doesn’t recall his exact words. But their meaning is burned in her memory: “I don’t really have a full handle on what happened to me. But I know now that something really wrong was happening, and I never want to go back there.”

AFTER WEIGHING HER OPTIONS, Dana decided to bring Elliott home. But first, she boxed up everything in his room. She went through the vents looking for weapons and stripped everything down to the stark essentials of a hospital ward.

No corded blinds. No loose sheets. Nothing Elliott could use to harm himself.

When Elliott got home, Dana outlined her new house rules. Elliott wouldn’t be allowed home alone. He wouldn’t be allowed online. And he would only have a flip phone.

At first, Elliott was angry about the new rules. But a few days later, he told Dana getting rid of his phone was the best thing that ever happened to him.

Elliott attended a partial hospitalization program for the next six weeks. Dana put him on a program of her own, too. Every day, he had to wake up early and go walk or run around the block. “You’re gonna go get sunshine in your eyes,” she told him.

Dana bought Elliott a secondhand iPod. Together, they started visiting libraries and checking out CDs. But all Elliott’s music picks had to be mom-approved. And Dana watched carefully over his shoulder whenever he uploaded songs to his device.

For the first time in six months, Dana glimpsed a light in her son’s eyes.

Gradually, Elliott started making progress forward. By the time another school year rolled around, Dana decided to transfer him to a smaller school for a fresh start.

Elliott’s new school didn’t have a band program. But teachers allowed him free rein of the old music room stocked with instruments and ’90s analog recording equipment. He started making friends and inviting them to play music with him.

Elliott’s new school closed at the end of that year. Today, he’s back at his old school. Dana told him he’ll be homeschooled if he slips up again.

But Elliott is in a much different headspace now, Dana said. He still doesn’t have a smartphone, and it bothers him now how much time his classmates waste online. Dana said he tells anyone who will listen, “Get rid of your smartphone and just get a flip phone and an iPod.”

Dana said he’s found a renewed sense of purpose in caring for his family. And he hopes to use his story to help others struggling like he did. At his school, Elliott hears a lot of kids parroting the same extreme ideas he used to believe, and that’s really upsetting—especially the anti-Semitism. He told his mom lots of his classmates deny the Holocaust.

Dana said most parents have no idea their kids believe these things.

When she shares Elliott’s story, people usually blame what happened on her parenting. Or they assume only “Goth kids” are vulnerable to radicalization. But Dana said that isn’t true: “It also happens to the captain of the football team.”

Dana said parents, teachers, psychologists, police—anyone working with children—need to understand the warning signs of online radicalization. And parents need to exercise their authority to protect their children, even if that means taking away their phones entirely.

“My son was going to die,” she said. “I should have taken it away four, five, six months before I did,” she added.

Most importantly, Dana said, parents need to address the crisis of isolation and meaninglessness teenagers face. She encourages parents to find like-minded families and start making memories in the real world. “Just make your house the party house for kids,” Dana said. “They need to be running out in the street or on their bikes.”

Several times a week, Elliott’s friends come over for garage band sessions. Sometimes, they play for eight hours on a Sunday. But Dana doesn’t mind the racket. “It means he’s connecting,” she said. “He’s happy.”