Dispatch · August 2026

Nihilistic Violent Extremism

On the NVE movement, sometimes called “gore groups”—online networks organized around contempt for human life, misogynist ideology, and the active recruitment of children into documented self-harm and violence—what they are targeting in rural communities, how their recruitment pipeline operates, and what families and practitioners need to know.

I first learned of this threat in August 2025, in a webinar MultiCare's forensic nursing team hosted with the FBI. I called the FBI team that same afternoon and asked whether they could bring a version of that training to Winthrop. A week later, three agents arrived in Winthrop, delivering training on Nihilistic Violent Extremism and ASAP active-shooter protocol to emergency officials and community leaders. Last month I hosted a second training, multidisciplinary and led by FBI agents from the Spokane field office, focused specifically on NVE recruitment dynamics and the community conditions that enable them. The threat profile NVE presents has evolved quickly enough that it warrants a dispatch outside the practitioner context—something that reaches families and educators directly. This is that dispatch.

What is covered here is disturbing. It is also documentable, reportable, and preventable. The aim of this Dispatch is to create pattern readers.

What Nihilistic Violent Extremism is

NVE is not a single organization. It is a constellation of online communities organized around several converging ideological commitments: contempt for human life, including the lives of members themselves; virulent misogyny; racial animus; and the active celebration of violence, self-harm, and mass-casualty events. Groups documented under the NVE designation include 764, CVLT (Cultist Violent and Lethal Terror), and Maniac Murder Cult, among others. The groups share membership overlap, operational methods, and a common ideological substrate. The FBI has categorized NVE as a domestic terrorism concern. The threat profile they present is distinct from—and more operationally sophisticated than—the diffuse ideological radicalization associated with incel culture or accelerationist forums, though there is ideological overlap at the margins.

The threat has escalated quickly. In March 2025 the FBI and the Internet Crime Complaint Center issued a public warning citing a sharp increase in activity from 764 and other violent online networks. Two months later, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of two men accused of leading a 764 subgroup that coerced at least eight minor victims into producing child sexual abuse material—evidence that the threat is not only escalating but actively being investigated and prosecuted.

What distinguishes NVE operationally is the direct, deliberate recruitment of children and teenagers—the FBI has documented victims as young as nine—with structured coercive methods, toward documented real-world violence and self-harm. These groups are not producing ideology for ambient consumption. They are actively identifying vulnerable young people and running a grooming process against them.

Who they target

The primary targets are girls and young women. The targeting is not incidental. Misogyny is structural to the NVE ideological frame, and the groups organize significant operational energy around the exploitation of girls specifically. LGBTQIA+ youth are disproportionately represented among documented targets—a convergence of vulnerability and ideological animus. Racial and ethnic minorities, and youth who are already experiencing social isolation, mental health challenges, or precarious family situations, are recruited at elevated rates.

The pattern is predatory and deliberate. NVE recruiters identify vulnerability markers in online environments and initiate contact as apparent peers, mentors, or community members. The initial contact is designed to appear benign.

The recruitment pipeline

Recruitment begins on platforms used by children: Roblox, Discord, and other social and gaming applications that parents reasonably regard as ordinary adolescent activity. The initial contact on these platforms often looks like a friendship or mentorship. The pipeline then moves the target toward private encrypted communication, away from the more public context where the contact began.

Once in private channels, the coercive process begins in a recognizable sequence. Early demands are small and framed as group membership rituals or relationship tests. Compliance with early demands is documented—images or video of self-harm, increasingly explicit content, or acts of violence against the target's own body. That documentation then becomes leverage. The escalation is structured: each act of compliance generates material that can be used to compel the next, larger act. CSAM creation—the production of child sexual abuse material—is a documented output of this pipeline. So is real-world violence, including violence directed at others and violence toward the self, up to and including suicide. So is recruitment: the group coerces the victim into finding and grooming the next target, extending the pipeline through people who were, until recently, on the other end of it.

That last piece matters for who is actually running this pipeline. Many of the people carrying it out are minors themselves. The group extracts recruitment as one more escalating demand, then folds them into the ideology it forced them to spread. The pipeline does not require an adult predator at every level to keep running, which is part of what makes it hard to see and harder to stop with approaches built around identifying adult offenders.

This is not accidental contact or radicalization by ambient exposure. It is coercive recruitment with established methods, operated by groups with shared infrastructure and a documented pattern of harm.

The coercion architecture

The escalation structure NVE groups use against their targets is recognizable to any practitioner familiar with intimate partner coercive control: early compliance as leverage for escalating demands, documentation of harm as ongoing threat material, isolation from outside relationships, and the systematic use of shame and exposure risk to prevent disclosure. The architecture is the same. The setting is online. The targets are children.

A separate escalation pathway, a shared victim population

NVE is a distinct escalation pathway—not a precursor stage of intimate partner violence, and not reducible to the intimate partner coercive control framework. The trajectory it produces is different: toward self-harm, suicide, CSAM exploitation, and perpetration of violence that may include mass-casualty events. It is its own pathway to the killing of girls, distinct from the intimate partner femicide the bulk of this site’s work addresses.

What NVE shares with gender-based violence is the victim population. Girls are the primary target. The misogynist ideology is structural to NVE as it is structural to the intimate partner violence framework. The mechanisms of silencing—image-based coercion, shame, the threat of exposure—have surface similarities to those documented in intimate partner coercive control. But the architecture is different, the trajectory is different, and the institutional response it requires is different. Collapsing the two produces analytic error: a practitioner who understands intimate partner coercive control does not automatically understand NVE, and the response protocols are not interchangeable.

The reason to name both in the same body of work is the victim population, not the mechanism. Communities investing in the protection of girls—rural communities, school districts, families, public health agencies—are facing two distinct and serious threats that share a target. The institutions protecting girls from intimate partner violence and the institutions protecting girls from NVE need each other’s intelligence without conflating their threat models.

NVE also carries a dimension that makes it nationally and internationally significant in ways the intimate partner violence framework has not yet established institutionally: it is explicitly transnational. 764, CVLT, and related groups operate across borders—documented in the United States and Canada by the FBI, in Europe by Europol, in the United Kingdom by the National Crime Agency. The targeting of children on global platforms is inherently cross-jurisdictional. The perpetrators, their infrastructure, and their victims are frequently in different countries simultaneously. This is a national security concern—not only a public health or criminal justice one—and it belongs in the analytical frame that treats the systematic targeting of girls as a threat to state integrity and transnational order. Sexual violence and state fragility opens that argument; NVE is one of its most operationally current examples.

What you can do

Warning signs are easier to catch when a parent or guardian already has visibility into a child's devices. Two proactive steps build that visibility before it is needed.

Install parental monitoring software on every device a child uses. Monitoring that surfaces new contacts, flags concerning language, and logs app activity gives an adult the visibility NVE recruiters count on not existing.

Restrict or remove access to the platforms recruitment actually uses. This dispatch has already named Roblox and Discord as documented recruitment vectors, and the same applies to social media broadly—these are the platforms where NVE recruiters make first contact because children are already there. Banning these apps outright, or delaying access until an age where monitoring and conversation can keep pace with it, closes off the point of first contact.

Neither step guarantees safety on its own. Both make the pattern below easier to see before it becomes a crisis.

Warning signs for families and educators

No single behavioral change is diagnostic. The pattern to notice is a constellation of changes that appear together, particularly around devices and online activity:

Sudden social withdrawal, particularly from in-person relationships that had previously been stable
Marked change in device behavior—screen secrecy, distress when a device is unavailable, use patterns that shift to night hours
New online relationships with adults or significantly older teens, particularly relationships the young person is reluctant to describe
Communication on platforms or in modes that were not previously present—new apps, private channel membership, encrypted messaging tools
Evidence of self-harm, or behavioral changes consistent with coercion or shame—hypervigilance, flinching, unexplained distress
Content consumption or language that reflects NVE ideological themes: contempt for life, celebration of violence, racial animus

If you observe this pattern: do not access the device, images, or content yourself. This is not about protecting privacy—it is about preserving evidence and avoiding legal exposure for the adult who accesses CSAM, even accidentally, in the course of trying to understand what is happening. Report to law enforcement and let them manage the device.

Reporting and resources

FBI. If a child has been targeted by an NVE group, or if you have encountered NVE recruitment activity, report to your local FBI field office, call 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324), or submit a tip at tips.fbi.gov. The FBI's Spokane field office covers eastern Washington and north Idaho and has agents with current NVE case experience.

NCMEC CyberTipline. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children operates the CyberTipline for reporting child sexual exploitation, including CSAM and online enticement. Report at CyberTipline.org or by phone at 1-800-843-5678. The CyberTipline transmits reports to the appropriate law enforcement agency. If a child has been coerced into producing CSAM, this is the primary reporting mechanism alongside direct law enforcement contact.

NCMEC's NetSmartz program produces age-appropriate digital safety resources for children and educational resources for parents and educators on online exploitation. Available at missingkids.org/netsmartz.

For educators and counselors: the FBI offers community presentations on NVE and online exploitation. Contact your local field office to inquire about scheduling. The Methow Valley community hosting experience in August 2025 and again last month demonstrates that these presentations are adaptable to small and rural communities—not resources available only to urban districts.

For practitioners

NVE coercion follows the same escalation pattern documented in intimate partner coercive control research and can be assessed using analogous frameworks. Practitioners working with youth should treat behavioral changes consistent with coercive online relationships as a mandatory-reporting concern. The shame and secrecy architecture NVE groups build into their coercive process is designed to prevent disclosure to exactly the adults who are in a position to respond. Young people subjected to this coercion need explicit reassurance that what happened is not their fault and that the adult in front of them can handle what they are about to hear. Multidisciplinary response—law enforcement, school counselors, victim advocates, and parents working in coordination—is the appropriate model. A young person who discloses NVE coercion should not be asked to tell the story repeatedly across single-agency contacts.

Selected sources and resources

Federal Bureau of Investigation. Nihilistic Violent Extremism. FBI.gov/investigate/terrorism/domestic-terrorism. Operational overview and reporting resources.
Federal Bureau of Investigation & Internet Crime Complaint Center. (2025, March 6). Violent Online Networks Target Vulnerable and Underage Populations Across the United States and Around the Globe. Public Service Announcement I-030625-PSA. IC3.gov.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). IC3.gov. For reporting internet-facilitated crime, including online exploitation of minors.
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs. (2025, May 1). Leaders of 764 Arrested and Charged for Operating Global Child Exploitation Enterprise. Justice.gov.
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. CyberTipline. CyberTipline.org. 1-800-843-5678. Primary reporting mechanism for CSAM and online enticement.
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. NetSmartz. MissingKids.org/NetSmartz. Age-appropriate digital safety education for children; educator and parent resources on online exploitation.
Institute for Strategic Dialogue. (2025, May 8). Terror without ideology? The rise of nihilistic violence. ISDGlobal.org.
Institute for Strategic Dialogue. (2025, September). Networks of Harm: A Victim-Centric Information Resource on the 764 Network. ISDGlobal.org.
Smith, P., & Adarlo, S. (2024, December 4). Brotherhood of blood: Understanding the origins and trajectory of the Maniac Murder Cult. GNET (Global Network on Extremism and Technology).
Winston, A. (2025, March 12). The violent rise of “No Lives Matter.” Wired.
CBC / The Fifth Estate. This violent extremist network targets kids online. Interactive companion to “Trapped: The Online Terror Network” (aired March 21, 2025). CBC.ca.
Europol. (2023). Nihilistic violent extremism: An emerging threat. European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation. (Early operational characterization of NVE as a distinct threat category.)
Finkelhor, D., Mitchell, K. J., & Wolak, J. (2000). Online Victimization: A Report on the Nation’s Youth. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Wolak, J., Finkelhor, D., & Mitchell, K. (2004). Internet-initiated sex crimes against minors: Implications for prevention based on findings from a national study. Journal of Adolescent Health, 35(5), 424.e11–424.e20.

The community trainings referenced in this dispatch are available to replicate in other rural communities. Practitioners and community organizers interested in hosting an FBI-led NVE or active-shooter training: inquiries@haliruna.com.