Young men are the forgotten victims

WHO has suffered most in this crisis? The people who’ve caught the virus? Their friends and relatives who haven’t been able to see them? Or wellconnected government advisors targeted by the media for taking long drives to ensure their eyesight is good enough to take long drives? It’s a close call.

But there is one group that has been especially overlooked, I think. No change there then because they were overlooked before coronavirus; they’ve always been overlooked. I’m talking about young men, especially young men from deprived backgrounds. They’re powerless and weak in Scotland and they feel it. But coronavirus doesn’t care. It’s a bully: it goes for the powerless and the weak.

I’m not talking here, obviously, about the direct effects of coronavirus – young people are more likely to survive Covid – I’m talking about the ancillary effects: lockdown, the economic damage, the closure of schools. All of these factors will have a disproportionately negative effect on young men. So could we start paying attention please?

First: lockdown. It’s grim, it’s lonely, and we know young people are more likely to feel depressed about it than older age groups.

We also know men are less good at dealing with the consequences for their mental health and more prone to coping with drugs, alcohol or even suicide. I’ve seen the young men among my friends and family struggle. It’s probably one of the reasons they’ve been way more likely than young women to break the lockdown rules.

Second: the economic damage. We’re in the middle of a crisis in which government policy is depressing the economy and we know from the 2008 financial crisis that it’s young people that bear the brunt; 12 years ago, youth unemployment rose by 40% in some countries. Women may be clustered in low-paid jobs, but the unemployment rate is higher for men and it gets higher the younger you are.

And third: education. Young men have been falling behind women in educational attainment for years and the locked gates of schools and colleges is going to make that worse and mostly it’s going to make it worse for men from deprived backgrounds. For a lot of young guys, school is the only chance they have and if it’s shut, their chance shuts down with it, and then they leave school and there are no jobs because of coronavirus, and then they’re more likely to get depressed or resort to drugs or crime. You can see the spiral, can’t you?

Part of the answer is to get in early and give men the skills they need to cope when life gets difficult; the other part of the answer is to treat them much

For a lot of young guys, school is their only chance and if it’s shut, their chance shuts down

better when they get into trouble and can’t cope. The alternative, especially under lockdown, is to see boys struggle at school, then struggle to get a job, then struggle with drugs and depression, and then, for some, end up in prison or a mortuary.

I once spoke about this to the former Scottish prisons inspector Brigadier Hugh

Munro and his take on it was that we need to focus on the lives of young men long before they start to struggle.

Boys, he said, are often forced to fit into an academic structure that’s not right for them and they rebel or drop out. Encourage their skills in other areas instead (sport for example) and you can prevent them getting into trouble.

But I was also interested in what the brigadier had to say about young men who do end up in trouble because we’re still getting that wrong in Scotland.

Young men who struggle at school are more likely to leave without qualifications and if you don’t have qualifications you’re more likely to get into trouble and end up in prison, and prison, really, is the last chance to turn things around. But no: it just gets worse.

Imagine, for example, you end up in Barlinnie. The chances are when you arrive there, you’ll be held in one of the tiny holding cells that were condemned last century as a breach of the law on human rights (a new inspection revealed this week they are still in use). It is also unlikely that you’ll get to access the education or rehabilitation or therapy you need. Fat chance: you’re banged up, then kicked out.

It’s mostly young men who end up this way and lockdown makes it even more likely by undermining the services that can help, like education or a decent job. As Hugh Munro points out, we’re imprisoning too many young men when a community alternative would be better. But we’re still failing them in other ways too.

And the bully of coronavirus, and the lockdown that’s supposed to beat it, is making it worse.