Sir Gareth Southgate has warned of a “crisis” facing boys and young men, who he says are being influenced by “toxic” online figures instead of real-life role models.
In his Richard Dimbleby Lecture, the former England manager spoke about his own struggles and those of his players, highlighting how many opened up emotionally during his time in charge.
Southgate said young men today are feeling isolated and unsure of their place in society. Since stepping down as England boss, he has visited schools and prisons and questioned whether young men are still building the resilience they need.
Ian Collins speaks with CEO of Beyond Equality, Daniel Guiness.
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In his Richard Dimbleby Lecture, the former England manager spoke about his own struggles and those of his players, highlighting how many opened up emotionally during his time in charge.
Southgate said young men today are feeling isolated and unsure of their place in society. Since stepping down as England boss, he has visited schools and prisons and questioned whether young men are still building the resilience they need.
Ian Collins speaks with CEO of Beyond Equality, Daniel Guiness.
Click here for more from Talk https://talk.tv
If you need any help visit: https://talk.tv/helplines
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NewsTranscript
00:00Let's move to this story. As we've been talking a little bit already, Gareth Southgate has
00:04warned that young men are being exploited by toxic influencers promoting harmful ideologies.
00:10This was the Richard Dimbleby lecture. It's a kind of an annual thing. This is the former
00:14England manager said, isolation and a lack of role models leave many vulnerable figures
00:22to figure out what equates to success. Money, dominance and emotional suppression prioritising
00:28personal gain over wellbeing. So it's that material world is out there again. Let's have
00:33a listen to Mr Southgate giving that lecture this morning.
00:38Young men are suffering. They're feeling isolated. They're grappling with their masculinity and
00:47with their broader place in society. As real world communities and mentorship declines,
00:54young men end up withdrawing, reluctant to talk or express their emotions. They spend
01:01more time online, searching for direction and are falling into unhealthy alternatives
01:07like gaming, gambling and pornography.
01:11That's Mr Southgate speaking at the Richard Dimbleby lecture which is on BBC One this
01:15evening at 10.40. With me is Daniel Guinness, co-founder and managing director of Beyond
01:20Equality. Afternoon to you, Daniel. Thank you for joining us. Your response, if you
01:24would, to Mr Southgate's comments this morning.
01:26I very much welcome the comments and at the moment we're finding that there's broad agreement
01:32in the UK from all sorts of different sides of politics and spectrums of belief that we
01:38do need to have this really serious conversation about how we're raising young men and what
01:43sort of future that we're enabling them to have for themselves and enabling them to take
01:48part in for the rest of society. It's a crucial conversation.
01:52Yeah. And is this, I mean, it seems the big focus is on screens and not just watching
01:58incessant TikTok videos, but all the other things that might go with it. That could be
02:04gaming and that can take you into a completely different world, which is quite comfortable,
02:10particularly for young boys, because there's a community there. It can take you, as Gareth
02:15Southgate alluded to, to pornography, which can become a complete obsession and has very
02:22obvious demonstrable negative effects on that one. It can also take you into some undesirable
02:28groups and areas too. We all know what the online world can do. If you sit there for
02:32long enough with a screen, there's a high chance, I guess, you're going to fall into
02:35one of them. Yeah. And certainly I think there's a lot
02:40to be said that there's a big part of the problem with this newly emerging world online
02:45that we failed to regulate. We failed to really understand as adults and therefore we've really
02:51failed to actually help our young people engage with effectively. Having said that, when you
02:55actually talk to young people, what comes out is they're using the internet in so many
03:00different ways than what you and I do and that we actually imagine them to do so. And
03:06the ways that they're using it can be really beneficial for them. They can find connection
03:11with people. If you imagine someone who's quite isolated in their own school group,
03:17maybe just take, for example, someone who's part of the LGBTQIA plus community, so a young
03:22gay man, for example, and he doesn't have that connection in the real life with other
03:26people, he can find support and encouragement online. So it's this complicated picture,
03:31which is it's positive, new connections, new information, but we really need to make
03:36sure that we're getting on top of the algorithms and also that the sort of voices that are
03:41coming into those online spaces are also ones that are very positive and providing these
03:48messages of hope and connection that are actually good for these young people.
03:52It's a very good point. And you're absolutely right. My little boy, he's 11. He checks out.
03:59He'll tell me a little fact about something. There was one just last night. I can't remember what it was.
04:02It genuinely fascinated me. I thought, how did I not know that? I said, where'd you get that?
04:06He said, I saw it on a YouTube video. And I thought, well, that's brilliant. That's what I want you to be watching.
04:10But of course, simultaneously, the next video he might stumble across and we try to monitor it.
04:15Obviously, he's not on YouTube a lot, but it could easily be somebody getting beheaded somewhere.
04:20I don't know. That's perhaps a bit greater argument about the content of YouTube and TikTok and the like.
04:27But it is that. Yes, of course, the Internet and online world has opened up so many things for adults and for kids.
04:34And that's brilliant. But of course, you can very easily fall down the wrong rabbit hole.
04:39Yeah, precisely. And I think there's a really important piece of training for young people on that social media and media literacy.
04:46So they can actually say, well, what's a very what's useful information?
04:50What's truth? Yeah. And what actually is just someone spouting opinions that are going to be harmful?
04:56But I think a lot of the solution has to come offline, because if we if we think about the experience of a young person and why they're going online and why they end up in the rabbit hole is because they've got a need.
05:07Right. They're curious about how do I flirt with somebody? Who am I going to be in the future?
05:14They're even looking up things like, how do I work out at the gym? And then that's what leads them down one of those YouTube rabbit holes.
05:21So we need to be making sure that we're actually addressing those real and genuine needs that young people have.
05:27And Gareth's rightly identified, sorry, Gareth Southgate's rightly identified that there are specific needs that young men have at the moment that we need to address.
05:36So we've got to make sure we're talking to those those mental well-being issues, to those healthy relationship issues that we've actually got people in real life,
05:45teachers, coaches, youth workers who are in these young men's lives, parents, uncles, cousins, whoever it might be, that's providing them with that guidance and with that support.
05:57So that really can actually navigate life and become the sorts of adults that we know that they can be and adults who are better and safer in themselves,
06:06but also ones who aren't actually participating in some of these more sexist or misogynistic or more violent or more extreme things that do come through those online places and are targeted directly at young men.
06:20Yeah. And when it comes to sort of influencers online, though, I wonder, you know, we know about the kind of bad ones.
06:26I'm thinking of the Taits and people like that. And there are quite a lot of other, we mentioned those because they're sort of well known for all the wrong reasons.
06:35But there are many others in that world that perpetuate sort of similar kind of content.
06:42I don't know. Are there sort of famous kind of positive role models?
06:47I mean, because, you know, if a kid sort of went online and someone said, oh, there's a great there's a great video you should watch, you should follow this guy, Father Richard Smithers.
06:56He's a he's a priest at the local church. Kids are going to go.
06:59I'm not going to watch that. You know, the positive sort of gentle, easy stuff doesn't seem as mesmeric or attractive.
07:07Yeah, it doesn't seem that, you know, in terms of I mean, you know this more than I do, but in terms of actually getting things seen, we need to be talking about things that are actually interesting and topical.
07:18That's really important. And the algorithms, what's more, are actually geared to push the more controversial opinions.
07:27So if you can get someone I mean, if you get comments afterwards saying this is complete trash, you know, why are you saying this?
07:32How could you be so hateful? That video is going to be seen by more people.
07:36Yeah. And, you know, some some some people are actually particularly targeting the content they're producing to be more more controversial, to be more hateful, to get more likes.
07:51So that's something that needs to be addressed at the regulation side of things.
07:54But yes, there are people putting out good messages. What we're seeing and we're involved in several research projects, as well as the many workshops we actually run talking to young people.
08:05What we're seeing is that young people have interests in topics and we want to be reaching them through those topics.
08:12You know, if it's an interest in gaming, you want to be reaching them through gaming as opposed to putting forward someone who said, this is how you be a good man today.
08:20That's less likely to be appealing. So we've got to make sure that the sorts of content they're getting in those spaces is more positive and picks up on some of these key messages that we know young people need to hear.
08:31And particularly at the moment, we know young men need to hear.
08:34Yeah, spot on. Daniel, thank you for your time. So I really appreciate that. Daniel Guinness, co-founder, manager, director of Beyond Equality.
08:41It's an absolute minefield because I know there's a lot of kids in my son's cohort that they've heard of Andrew Tait, right?
08:50Now, the only way they've heard of that is online, OK? They would never have heard any of their parents go, oh, that Tait guy is really good.
08:55They weren't making any opinion about him. They never really watched him. They'd heard of him because it would come up in a more tacit fashion.
09:02So you might be watching a YouTube video where someone's joking about Tait or something, but it could come up.
09:10Keeping a kid away from YouTube entirely is tricky, bearing in mind, you know, half the TV programmes that I'm talking about official stuff, not, you know, some dodgy bedroom podcasts and some just loud mouth characters.
09:25You know, the proper stuff is on YouTube, you know, football matches are now shown on YouTube, tennis matches on you, etc.
09:32So it's it's a bit of a minefield out there.
09:35Ultimately, parental control. But it's a little like when you tell you, you know, you don't want your kids to have loads of Haribo and you go, right, they're not going to have Haribo.
09:44Then they go to a kid's party. And what's the first thing they're given at the kid's party? A bag of Haribo.
09:49How do you give it? They're in the school playground. They swap snacks at a certain age.
09:53They do that all the time. They don't swap. The word swap, by the way, that is so old.
09:56They trade. They trade their snacks for, you know, they upgrade or downgrade depending on what they're trading.
10:06They live in a different world. It's a whole different world. You can't completely keep a screen away from a kid.
10:12Apart from anything else, their homework is done in quite a lot of areas on a screen as well.
10:18And I don't want him to not be able to watch some things like we sit there, me and him.
10:23We'll watch a whole half hour of, you know, great goals scored in a variety of compilation.
10:30You're one of those. I mean, it could be something recent. It could be something old.
10:34And that's great that you can see all of that stuff. And there's loads of other things you can watch.
10:39Probably outweighs by a country mile the bad stuff.
10:43And by the way, this is not just about YouTube. It's about all sorts of other areas.
10:46You get into the gaming world as well. And then you find that, you know, because they can chat as well.
10:51They can message while they're gaming. So you've got to watch that or turn it off altogether.
10:56Then you don't know who they're chatting to. Oh, it's nice. It's my age. Somebody my age.
11:00You don't know it's somebody your age. They say they're your age. You don't know that for a fact.
11:04They seem pretty cool. Ah, that sort of raises a flag. They seem pretty cool.
11:08Yeah, that's what those people do. So it is an incredibly difficult area to police.
11:14But having strong male role models, I do think, is a basic core.
11:18And you need strong female role models. Obviously, your mum, etc., would be the obvious.
11:23But I don't think there's quite parity in the same way as it is with your dad.
11:27I think there's a lack of that with young boys. So that's one thing Southgate was right about.