by Tony Rucinski, Coalition for Marriage
Something is going badly wrong for Britain’s boys. Not in one area of life – in every area. I sat down with Luke Taylor, researcher at the Centre for Social Justice, to talk about three years of work that maps just how serious this has become. Luke is also part of the 2% – a young man who got married in his twenties, bucking a trend his own research documents. Watch the full conversation here.
The numbers in the CSJ’s Lost Boys report, published March 2025, are hard to sit with. 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 aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment, or training rose by 40% since the pandemic, compared to 7% for young women. Two and a half million children in this country have no father figure at home. Among children in custody, 76% had an absent father. Those are not abstract statistics. It is the state of a lost generation.
The follow-up report on men and culture found that more than three-quarters of people think teenage boys lack proper role models in popular culture. Over half of men do not feel that being a man is “something to be proud of”. Luke names the problem plainly: “We almost got to the stage where we talked about toxic masculinity so much we were at risk of making masculinity itself sound toxic.”