The reactions to Khalid Masood’s attack last week played out with script-like predictability: rightwing commentators tried desperately to blame the actions of this Kent native on immigration, while the media pored over whatever anecdotes they could find from neighbours and schoolmates. All The Day Today cliches were ticked off: he was “always polite”, he came from “a normal family”, he once “got drunk” as a teenager.

This kind of desperate profiling plays to people’s desire to believe we should be able to spot terrorists. But while rent-a-gobs flail around naming and shaming Kent and drunk teenagers, it is telling how rarely one feature common to many “lone wolf” attackers is called out: a history of domestic abuse.

Before Katie Hopkins gets excited, this isn’t evidence of a misogyny unique to the Muslim culture, or Muslim killers

A relative of Masood’s former wife Farzana Isaq told the Daily Mirror that Isaq had fled her ex-husband in terror after just three months of marriage: “He was very violent towards her, controlling in every aspect of her life – what she wore, where she went, everything.”

Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who killed more than 80 people after driving a truck into a crowd on Bastille Day in Nice last year, had a long history of domestic violence, as did Omar Mateen, who last summer killed 49 people in a Florida nightclub. “He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished, or something like that,” Mateen’s former wife Sitora Yusufiy told the Washington Post. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bomber brothers, had previously been arrested for domestic assault and battery of a woman.

Before Katie Hopkins gets excited, this isn’t evidence of a misogyny unique to the Muslim culture, or Muslim killers. The stepmother of Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine people in Charleston in 2014, accused his father of abusing her, suggesting Roof was raised in a home where gendered control was normalised. Evangelical Christian Robert Lewis Dear was so pro-life that he not only killed three people in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado in 2015, he also had an extensive history of violence against women and domestic abuse, and an arrest for rape. Seung-Hui Cho, a South Korean expatriate who shot and killed 32 people at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 2007, had previously been charged with stalking and harassing female students.

The simplistic explanation here is that these men were all just bad ’uns and, given they had no trouble with killing countless strangers, it is not surprising they terrorised the women in their lives. But this is to look at the correlation the wrong way around. Domestic violence is frequently a way for male abusers to try to impose so-called traditional gender roles on their female partner – beating them when the laundry isn’t done, telling them what to wear – using violence to validate their own feelings of insecurity. So it is almost inevitable that these men would then be attracted to belief systems – whether it’s Isis, evangelical Christianity or the fundamentalist version of pretty much any major religion – that advocate wildly restrictive attitudes towards gender and endorse patriarchal systems which encourage men to punish women for their own failings. (Isis has infamously noted this, including promises of young female sexual slavery in its recruiting tools.) Paul Gill, a UCL lecturer who studies so-called lone wolf terrorists, told the New York Times last year: “Having a history of violence might help neutralise the natural barriers to committing violence.” In other words, wives and girlfriends make good target practice.

The problem isn’t Islam, or a perverted interpretation of Islam, but rather a perversion of frustrated masculinity. After all, 98% of mass killings are perpetrated by men, and many of the attackers discuss women in proprietorial terms. Roof, for instance, told his victims before killing them in the church: “You rape our women. You have to go.”

And yet this is almost never discussed, because there is no political capital to be gained by suggesting warped masculinity might be more to blame than Muslims. After all, domestic violence is a problem that spans cultures, and if President Trump were to try to ban men accused of domestic violence from entering America instead of Muslims, he would lose some major figures in his own White House. Steve Bannon was charged in 1996 with domestic violence, battery and trying to dissuade the victim – his wife, in other words – from testifying.

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The case was dropped when she didn’t turn up to court, and she later testified that Bannon had ordered her to leave town. Bannon denied the accusations. Trump chose Andrew Puzder to be his labor secretary, but Puzder withdrew his nomination last month, in part because of long-standing allegations from his ex-wife that he had physically abused her. Puzder denies the charges. Then there is Trump himself, who, according to 1990 sworn divorce deposition by his first wife, Ivana, tore out a handful of her hair and raped her because he was so furious that his “scalp reduction” operation had been more painful than she’d promised. Trump has always denied these allegations – both the abuse and that he had a scalp reduction operation – and Ivana later said she didn’t mean rape “in a literal or criminal sense”. But no one could explain away the tape in which Trump bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy”.

And yet, Trump’s approach to terrorism is – like the right wing in this country – focused on the idea that Muslims specifically are dangerous. In fact, as David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center of Terrorism and Security, recently said: “Attacks by Muslims accounted for only one third of one percent of all murders in America last year.” Meanwhile, Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group, analysed all the FBI data on mass shootings in the US from 2009 to 2015, and found that 16% of the attackers had previously been charged with domestic violence. And yet instead of calling out deep-rooted patterns of misogyny that might hit close to home, the right insists on looking only outwards and demonising an already demonised religion. Funny, that.