Little boy lost: The challenges facing a generation of young men

Kory McCrimmon was just 16 years old when he was stabbed in the heart in a Glasgow park, killed in a row over £50. His attacker was variously described by the tabloids as a “brute”, a “lout”, and a “feckless ned”. While he was perhaps all of those things, he was also a 13-year-old child at the time of the incident. Last month, the boy, now aged 14, pled guilty to a charge of culpable homicide and will be sentenced in May. 

Presiding over the case, Lord Mulholland, the country’s former chief prosecutor, said it showed the “utter folly of running with a gang”. And yet while gang violence is clearly nothing new, particularly in the west of Scotland, the court heard how the row between the two teenagers had been ratcheted up on social media, the pair sending each other threats on Instagram before arranging the meeting which would lead to Kory’s death – one young life snuffed out, another changed forever. 

For those of us who passed our formative years in a largely pre-internet age, a time free of smartphones and social media, the world looks like an increasingly complicated and dangerous place for our young people. While there are undoubtedly good things that come from the internet and connections that are made and facilitated online, with each passing year the darkness that exists in the virtual world casts a longer shadow over the lives of our children.

Intuitively, it is something they themselves realise. A poll published last week by the University of Glasgow’s John Smith Centre found almost 70 per cent of 16–29-year-olds think social media should be banned for under-16s, as has happened in Australia.

Both sexes are of course impacted by what they experience online, but it is young men, already lagging behind their female peers educationally and often increasingly adrift from wider society, who are especially vulnerable to the lure of violence and ideologies of hate. It is a crisis which has implications for us all, boys and girls, men and women. A crisis which has been hiding in plain sight.

Failure to address the growing sense of alienation felt by many young men does not merely pose some sort of theoretical risk, but is already having real-life consequences on our streets, in our workplaces, and in our schools. A survey by the NASUWT teaching union, published last week, found nearly half (49 per cent) of female teachers in Scotland have experienced physical abuse or violence, compared with 36 per cent of their male colleagues. Five per cent of female teachers said they had experienced “sexual abuse” such as sexism or misogyny from pupils.

Those figures followed a warning from the National Crime Agency that “sadistic” online gangs of teenage boys now pose an “unprecedented” risk. These online communities, known as “Com” networks, are said to be behind cyber-attacks, fraud, blackmail and child sexual abuse. As with knife-carrying gangs of young men on the street, these individuals are apparently brought together by notions of belonging to a community, no matter how twisted its sense of purpose.

In his book The Anxious Generation, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt advances an idea he calls the “great rewiring”, a reshaping of children’s minds and lives through technology. According to Haidt, the rise of the smartphone and social media has coincided with an era of protective parenting which has had the unintended consequence of shielding this generation from the sort of risk-taking and free play that allowed their parents and grandparents to thrive.

Invoking the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who wrote about social isolation and rootlessness (anomie) at the end of the nineteenth century, Haidt says: “That, I believe, is what has happened to Gen Z. They are less able than any generation in history to put down roots in real-world communities populated by known individuals who will still be there a year later.” 

That phenomenon was undoubtedly exacerbated by the pandemic where young people, at a critical point in their development, were made to put their lives on hold to safeguard their grandparents’ generation. While teenagers confining themselves to their bedrooms, unable to attend school in-person or socialise with friends, may have seemed like a necessary sacrifice at the time, it has had a profound impact that we are now only beginning to understand. 

According to the Office for National Statistics, there are nearly a million young people aged 16 to 24 in the UK who are not in education, employment or training (NEET), 13.4 per cent of all those in that age bracket, compared with just 10.8 per cent in late 2019, before Covid arrived in the UK. Of the total number of young people who are NEET, 542,000 are young men (a near-40 per cent increase since 2020) and 445,000 are young women (a 20 per cent increase).

In Scotland, girls outperform boys at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher. And while the gap has reduced slightly in recent years, females outnumber males in both universities and colleges, with the disparity widest in higher education courses (48.2 per cent / 51.8 per cent). The proportion of men with low or no qualifications (9.7 per cent) is higher than that for women (8.5 per cent).

Despite being neither new nor unique to Scotland, the gender-related attainment gap is still relatively poorly understood. A 2017 paper by Val Corry, a former secondary headteacher, concluded that the issue of gender had been subsumed within the wider inclusion and diversity agenda. And when the Scottish Government established a gender equality taskforce in 2020 – around a month before the first Covid lockdown – its remit was to ensure “girls and young women in Scotland have a gender equal experience of education and learning”.

Last month the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a centre-right think tank set up by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith and Tim Montgomerie, published a report entitled Lost Boys, which warned of a generation of young men being “left in the dust” by their female counterparts. The CSJ said more attention had been given to issues affecting women and girls in recent years, with its report an attempt to “address the imbalance”. But one of its conclusions – that an “epidemic of fatherlessness” is partly to blame for the situation young men find themselves in – was criticised by Anna Tarrant, a sociologist and researcher of fatherhood, as overly simplistic. 

Luke Taylor, a researcher at the CSJ, says there’s been a good deal of political interest in the report since it was published. “I think we put our finger on the pulse of what everyone wanted to talk about but wasn’t quite sure how to,” he says. “What this report has done has given people a platform to stand on and say that there is a challenge facing young boys. We kind of knew it but didn’t know how to talk about it.”

If there was little discussion of the issue before, then that’s certainly not been the case in recent weeks. Giving the Richard Dimbleby Lecture last month, former England football manager Gareth Southgate said men needed better role models and warned that too many were withdrawing from society and into a world of “unhealthy alternatives like gaming, gambling and pornography”. And the success of Netflix’s Adolescence has forced politicians to sit up and take notice, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer hosting a roundtable involving the show’s creators, charities, and young people. The prime minister also welcomed a move by the streaming platform to allow the drama to be screened for free in schools.  

Keir Starmer hosts a meeting at Downing Street with the creators of Netflix's Adolescence | Alamy

During his time as first minister, Humza Yousaf spoke of feeling a sense of responsibility to “root out and tackle the toxic masculinity and male self-entitlement that leads to violence, harassment, misogyny and abuse against women”.

“There is a perfect storm of factors that are coming together that are making predominantly young white men more susceptible to the arguments and populism of the far-right,” he says now. “For all we’ve talked about toxic masculinity [and] the issues around not having a positive male role model, nobody has been talking about the solution to that.”  

Yousaf raises the malign influence of figures such as Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed misogynist who along with his brother is under investigation in Romania for human trafficking and money laundering. Tate also faces allegations of rape and sex with a minor. In the NASUWT teacher survey published last week, one respondent highlighted the impact of online personalities such as Tate on boys as young as 12 or 13.

“Out of an English class of 28 S2 pupils last year, four boys opted, despite discouragement, to write a persuasive essay on why Andrew Tate is the ‘Goat’ [Greatest of All Time] which included praise of his view that women are a man’s property,” the teacher said. “This low view of woman and rhetoric plays out in how little regard and respect many of my female colleagues are encountering.”

Yousaf says negative media portrayals of young men and phrases such as “white privilege” – a term he admits to using himself in the past – are “deeply unhelpful” and help push boys towards extreme influencers online. He likens the experience to his own, growing up as a young Muslim post 9/11.

“I represent Glasgow Pollok, where there are some areas of very high deprivation. There are young men living difficult lives, particularly if they were born post-2008 and all the austerity that has come with that; they don’t feel they are in a privileged position, but the world is telling them, ‘you’ve got heaps of privilege and you should be thankful for it’.

“I was 16 at the time of 9/11 and from then onwards for around the next decade, we were bombarded with negativity about Muslims… The difference was that within the Muslim community, we understood what our positive identity as Muslims was. We had a set of values – core beliefs – that were positive and part of our identity… I’m not sure we’ve worked enough with young men or ourselves to understand what a positive male identity looks like and encompasses.”

Andrew Tate, who is currently under criminal investigation in Romania | Alamy

In last week’s UK Youth Poll carried out by the John Smith Centre, 74 per cent of women and 60 per cent of men agreed that ‘toxic masculinity’ is becoming more of a problem, although the term itself was not explained or defined. Elsewhere the polling found that 57 per cent would prefer to live in a democracy over a dictatorship. On the question of whether “feminism has done more harm than good”, 42 per cent agreed (rising to 52 per cent among men) and 45 per cent disagreed.

Young men clearly face many challenging circumstances in their lives, but it would be wrong to simply blame the internet or a lack of positive male role models. In fact, to do so lets society – and government – off the hook. And we should not overlook the experience of young women, often the victims of male aggression and violence and suffering from their own problems. Indeed, of the recent 8,724 referrals to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in Scotland, 55.9 per cent were for females and 44.1 per cent male.

And yet not to consider the unique difficulties facing boys and men does a disservice to all our young people. “The secondary effect of improving the lives of young men and boys will be that women, and girls, and families will also benefit,” says Taylor. “That’s a really key point.” 

Failure to talk, to discuss challenges in their lives, is often cited as a reason why the suicide rate in Scotland is so much higher among men than women. Of 792 probable suicides in 2023, three-quarters were men – a mortality rate more than three times that of women. The current generation faces many of the challenges their fathers did and many which are unique to their own experience. The conversation about the problems facing them will be hard – it may well be divisive – but it needs to be had.