Sophie Kerr: We need to find our Lost Boys – and fast

Sophie Kerr is a London based professional within asset management, a conservative member and activist, and aspiring parliamentary candidate.

In recent weeks the critically acclaimed Netflix series Adolescence has shaken the nation. Referenced across the media and even by the Prime Minister, it has shone a light on how distant we have become from the reality of what it is like growing up as a male child in this country.

Boys in the United Kingdom are achieving lower grades than their female counterparts, earning less if they reach the workplace and 40 per cent of boys aged 16-24 are currently described as NEET (not in education, employment or training) vs just 7 per cent of girls. They are unlikely to have an accessible male role model with 16-year-olds currently twice as likely to have a smartphone than a father at home, and men making up just 26.7 per cent of teachers (falling to 14 per cent at primary school).

At school, boys have described being left out of discussions about success and achievement, as a response to history previously overlooking women. There are weeks dedicated to celebrating women, those of LGBTQA+ orientation and different ethnic backgrounds. There is nothing to celebrate straight white males, raise the profile of their achievements or promote role models.

Instead, children are educated about rape culture, domestic abuse, coercive control and sexual violence – where overwhelmingly the perpetrators are male – from a very young age. This has unsurprisingly led girls to feel scared of boys from an increasingly young age. Boys, in turn, feel as though they are painted as the enemy before they have even left primary school.

They have been driven further online than girls due to the video-gaming centric nature of their socialising. In the BBC Radio 4 series About The Boys one mother who tried to encourage her son to go to his friends house was heartbreakingly met with: “If I go to his house then we cannot play our games together.”

Throughout the series boys said they could not see the benefit of meeting in person: they were seen as a problem when socialising around town, and social gatherings with the opposite gender, such as parties, were seen as risky. There was a feeling up and down the country that there was no physical place where they were welcome and that engaging with the opposite sex could destroy their lives (for example, if they attended a party and kissed a girl who later changed her mind, the boy would be inundated with online and in-person abuse and risk complete social cancellation).

Many teenagers are online 24/7. In an interview with the Daily T podcast, the actor and star of Adolescence Stephen Graham said: “These [phones] are parenting our children just as much as we are.” While podcast host Camilla Tominey acknowledged “we are physically speaking less to our children” with adults also having their heads in their phones.

As wages have stagnated fewer families can afford for a parent to stay home (75.6 per cent of mothers were employed in 2022) and children are spending increasing amounts of time in wraparound childcare. This means that Monday to Friday, 8am-6pm or later, children do not see their parents and are often in situations where the ratio of children to adults is 30:1.

Coupling this with smartphone access must be dangerous and a report from Everyone’s Invited shows how chilling the results of this unsupervised consumption of online content can be. In the UK 60 per cent of children under nine-years-old have viewed pornography. Teachers from 1,664 primary schools have reported instances of ‘Rape Culture’ in the form of everything from inappropriate touching to penetration. Almost half of children under the age of seven are showing signs of misogynistic behaviour or beliefs.

I don’t believe this country has suddenly birthed a generation of bad boys. I believe that these children don’t feel they have a place in the world they inhabit and without adults to turn to, they turned to their third parent: the internet.

When boys describe how they encounter incel influencers it is generally when looking for advice for questions that every boy has: How to get started at the gym, what to eat? What does it mean to be a man? What does success look like? How do I get a girlfriend?

In asking those questions the internet hands them someone who produces content with answers to all these questions, and a whole community of what looks like support. These creators will be right sometimes – usually on the gym and eating – but to a child, why wouldn’t this person always be right?

There is one thing I want to make absolutely clear: this is not a boy or a girl problem, this is an everyone problem. We need to stop over-segregating our society and prioritising and de-prioritising based on characteristics people cannot help.

We need to catch these drifting boys and bring them back into the fold. We need to prove to them that that we care and they can win in this world by working hard, being kind and, most importantly, being themselves.

I would argue that the values that are the antidote to the problem are commonplace in the Conservative Party. I became a Conservative because of our promotion of family values, meritocracy and social mobility – and I am not alone. The Conservative Policy Forum’s 2024 survey to define Conservative values found that over 83 per cent of us value family and 75 per cent think it is vital to support the most vulnerable in our society, which as this article illustrates, has become our boys.

As a party, we reject identity politics and have seen how DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion), with all its good intentions, can overstep into persecuting those born with characteristics they cannot help if they are perceived as being from a “privileged” group. Privilege is neither permanent or guaranteed. Being white and male does not mean you have the support system in place to get through school, university and into a graduate scheme or work or an apprenticeship.

Michael Conroy, founder of Men At Work, describes boys being rewarded differently at school to girls. Girls being encouraged to work harder as house points could only be earned through high grades. Whereas for boys, points were awarded for meeting basic standards of behaviour. When the school raised their expectation of boys and implemented a more challenging reward structure, their grades rose too.

Providing them with healthy challenges, banning smart phones in schools and following Australia’s brave lead in taking children off social media altogether would be a fantastic start. Following this up by working with businesses to invest in the workforce of tomorrow by engaging with children earlier and offering mentor/ work experience opportunities will provide an understanding of how work contributes to personal identity and success. Reintroducing physical spaces like youth clubs and ensuring every child has regular in-person communication with a trusted adult will help them healthily navigate growing up and finding their place in the world.

We need our renewal plan to guarantee anyone with ability is rewarded from nursery to retirement, and support families in producing the adults of tomorrow to the highest possible standard to the benefit of our country as a whole.