ROSS Kemp has a new documentary series, Lost Boys, Deadly Men, airing on Crime+Investigation. It is about incels. It is, in other words, about the wreckage. What it is not about – what almost nobody making content about angry, isolated young men wants to talk about – is the factory.
Britain is in the middle of a slow-motion male crisis that predates Andrew Tate, predates the manosphere, and predates every think-piece about toxic masculinity. It has been building for 60 years. The Centre for Social Justice has spent the last two years mapping it, and its Lost Boys project, deserves more serious attention than it has received.
The headline numbers are bad enough. Boys trail girls at every stage of education from nursery to university, where women now outnumber men by three to two. The number of young men not in education, employment or training has risen by 40 per cent since the pandemic, compared with 7 per cent for young women. Two and a half million children in this country have no father figure at home. Among children in custody, 76 per cent had an absent father. Almost half of first-born children do not live with both natural parents by the age of 14. For those born in 1970, that figure was just 21 per cent.
These are not separate data points. They are the same sentence written in different ways.
The CSJ’s polling found that almost two thirds of young women aged 18 to 24 describe most young men as ‘pretty frightening’. More than half of young men say the media portrays men as ‘a bit pathetic’. Both things are true simultaneously, and together they describe a generation that has been given no coherent account of what a good man looks like. As one CSJ researcher put it in an interview with me, society has produced the devil but not the messiah – we can point to Andrew Tate and say do not be that, but we have no comparable figure saying be this instead.
That vacuum does not stay empty. It fills with whatever is available online.
The Government’s response has been to focus on misogyny. Police-recorded violence against women and girls rose by 37 per cent between 2018 and 2023, and that is a real problem that deserves a real answer. But telling a generation of boys who are already falling behind in every measurable area of life that they are a problem for society – which 41 per cent of sixth-formers say they have been told in school lessons – is not an answer. It is an accelerant.
The structural cause of all of this is not difficult to identify. It is the one that is most difficult to say aloud.
Boys need fathers. Not male role models in the abstract, not mentors recruited through government programmes, not a male teacher in the nearly one in three primary schools that have none. Fathers. Men who are present, committed and legally bound to the family they helped to create. The data on what happens without them is unambiguous and has been for decades. Which brings us to marriage.
The CSJ’s I Do? report, published last month and drawing on ONS data for England and Wales, documents a collapse so total it barely registers as news any more. Marriages in England and Wales have fallen from more than 400,000 a year in the early 1970s to 224,402 in 2023, the lowest since records began in the 1850s, against a population that has grown by 11million. Among men under 25, the marriage rate has fallen by 98 per cent. A young married man is now in the top 2 per cent of his age group. A pensioner is more likely to marry than a young man.
This is what the ‘capstone’ model of marriage looks like at full maturity. The sociologist Andrew Cherlin identified the shift two decades ago. Marriage, he argued, had moved from being a cornerstone – the foundation on which adult life is built – to a capstone, the reward placed on top once everything else is already in place: the career, the house, the fully formed individual identity. It sounds reasonable. In practice it means that marriage keeps receding just beyond reach for most people, particularly those without the economic security the capstone model demands. It also means that children are increasingly conceived and raised outside the stable committed framework that the evidence consistently shows produces the best outcomes for them.
The research on early marriage is instructive here. A major 2022 report from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia found little evidence that marrying after 25 produces stronger marriages, and some evidence of slightly higher relationship quality among those marrying in their early 20s, especially among husbands. The assumption that delaying marriage produces better marriages is not supported well by the data. What it produces is fewer marriages.
None of this is fashionable to say. The cultural infrastructure that once said it – the Church, the extended family, the intergenerational community – has been in retreat for 50 years. The CSJ notes that male spaces where formation once happened, such as churches, sports clubs, trade unions, and pubs as genuine community anchors, have all declined together. What replaced them has not replaced what they provided: rites of passage, moral accountability and the experience of being welcomed into a community of men and told you now have duties to it. These are not available on an app.
The boys becoming men without any of this are not a mystery. They are a prediction. And the prediction has been sitting in the data for a generation, waiting for someone to take it seriously enough to act on it.
Ross Kemp is filming the aftermath. The question is whether anyone in a position to change things will read the reports that explain the cause.
