Reeling from mass stabbing, Australians ask: Was it about hatred of women?

Sydney: Mary Aravanopoulos stood clutching her daughter, huddling for safety with about 15 other women in the dress shop filled with ethereal organza gowns. They had watched a man saunter past in the mall corridor, unhurriedly, swinging a large knife in his hand back and forth.

Soon, they heard about one woman getting stabbed, then another.

Amid the confusion in those panicked moments, Aravanopoulos said she immediately thought to herself: “Oh, my God, it’s all about women.”

By Monday, many others in Australia had reached the same conclusion about the weekend’s shocking stabbing rampage at a Sydney mall that left six people dead, five of them women. Of the dozen other people who were injured by the seemingly random act of mass violence — one of the deadliest in the country in recent decades — all but two were female, among them a baby girl just 9 months old.

There may never be a clear explanation of the motives of the attacker, who was known to suffer from mental illness and was shot dead by a police inspector, Amy Scott.

But for many people, it was yet another reminder of the misogyny and threats of violence that women can face in Australian society. Less than 24 hours before the stabbings, hundreds of people had taken to the streets to protest a recent string of high-profile murders of three women. And Monday, a civil case ruling appeared to validate a years-old allegation of rape that forced a reckoning of how the clubby, male-dominated Australian establishment had victimized women for decades.

“The ideology of the attacker was crystal clear — a hatred of women,” Josh Burns, a member of Parliament, wrote on the social platform X on Monday. “We must call it out for what it is.”

For Maria Lewis, an author and a screenwriter, the attacker’s actions, unexplained as they may be, carried echoes of an Australian idea of what it means to be a man.

“Bros-supports-bros culture is so deeply and inherently tied in with the Australian idea of masculinity,” she said. “That real testosterone-laden idea of what masculinity represents, there’s a pop culture mainstream representation of it that gets constantly reinforced.”

Monday was a national day of mourning in Australia, flags flying at half-staff throughout the country. The attacker was identified by authorities as Joel Cauchi, 40, a man who was known to authorities but had never been arrested.

“The gender breakdown is, of course, concerning,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a radio interview Monday morning, saying police were looking into whether the attacker deliberately targeted women.

Cauchi had recently moved thousands of miles to the Sydney area from Queensland, in the country’s northeast.

In Toowoomba, Queensland, Cauchi’s father, Andrew Cauchi, was asked by news reporters gathered outside his home why his son, who had not been in regular contact with his family, may have targeted women.

The older Cauchi said it could have been out of frustration from his inability to date women.

“He wanted a girlfriend, and he’s got no social skills, and he was frustrated out of his brains,” the older Cauchi told local news media.

Tessa Boyd-Caine, CEO of Australia’s National Research Organization for Women’s Safety, said it was understandable for people to reach for a gender-based explanation in the immediate aftermath of the attack. At the same time, she cautioned that the vast majority of cases of violence against women occur in the home and at the hands of people they know, rather than indiscriminately, as in Saturday’s attack.

“How do we make sense of a random act of such brutal, fatal violence, by a man who police are considering might have targeted women?” she said. “It’s such an early stage of the investigation, but people are going to want to know answers to difficult questions.”

By Monday, all six victims killed in Saturday’s stabbings had been identified. The women were Ashlee Good, a 38-year-old new mother; Jade Young, 47, a mother of two daughters; Dawn Singleton, 25, a fashion employee; Pikria Darchia, 55, an artist and designer; and Yixuan Cheng, a Chinese citizen studying in Sydney. The lone male was Faraz Tahir, 30, a security guard and a recent arrival from Pakistan.

Police officials said Monday they had completed their investigation of the crime scene and returned control of the shopping complex to its operators.

Across from the complex, which remained closed, a steady stream of mourners continued to leave flowers Monday, adding to a large pile that had grown to stretch across multiple storefronts. Many visitors were groups of women — mothers and daughters holding hands, friends wiping tears off one another, women seemingly gripping onto their baby girls a little bit tighter.

Aravanopoulos and her daughter, Alexia Costa, were among those leaving flowers. They had returned to retrieve their car, which had been inaccessible in the cordoned-off mall since Saturday.

Aravanopoulos, 55, said she felt particularly guilty about Saturday’s brush with danger because she had insisted the pair come shopping that afternoon, to pick out a dress for her daughter’s upcoming 21st birthday. As a woman who works in the male-dominated field of construction, she has brought up her daughters to never back down and always stand up for themselves, she said.

“They think the women won’t fight back,” she said.

With the belief that the attacker was singling out women, she said she shuddered to think what would have happened if the young, female store managers had not acted quickly and pulled down the shutters.

“It was a shop full of women, and the managers were the heroes to us,” she recounted.