Interview

Care

Change

Community

Masculinity

13 June 2025

5 min read

There’s a simple solution to society’s lost boys

Mentoring the fatherless helps and heals

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A teenager slumped against a sofa plays a video game

Zach Wear on Unsplash .

What if nearly every major social pathology could be halted upstream? What if there was evidence to suggest that they commonly flow from one singular factor? What would we do – would we sit back and wait for the State to intervene, pointing to where we know the problem is beginning? Or would we wade up that stream ourselves, and start damning up the current?

Richard Kay and Robert Mansel Lewis have chosen the latter option. They help run Chapter2, a charity that offers mentoring for boys aged seven to 16. And they have identified fatherlessness as the factor that is linked to many major social pathologies to be found in Western society today.

Earlier this year, the Centre for Social Justice brought out a report called Lost Boys. It found that 2.5 million children in the UK do not live with a father figure, and that just under half of young Britons grow up with one biological parent, more often than not their mother.

Back in 2013, the numbers were strikingly higher in low-income areas, with 65 per cent of children aged 12–16 in the bottom 20 per cent of income households not living with both birth parents – this was 26 per cent higher than in better-off households. What’s more, when children were aged three, the chance of them being in the bottom income quintile was 21 per cent if their parents were married, and a massive 81 per cent if they were in lone-parent families.

So, we can already see a clear line drawn between fatherlessness and poverty,. Chapter2 (informed by the work of psychologist, Stephen Baskerville) also point out that fatherlessness is linked to alcohol abuse, drug abuse, truancy in school, incarceration, and mental health difficulties – all among young boys, in particular.

There’s a smorgasbord of factors and influences that are making it increasingly complex to be a ‘healthy’ and ‘happy’ man right now. “You don’t even need to put the word ‘toxic’ in front of ‘masculinity’ anymore, Kay points out. “It’s just assumed. If we need to ask what healthy masculinity is, people really don’t know.”

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in a coffee shop with ‘boys will be... what we teach them to be’ emblazoned on the side of it. It feels as though multiple destructive forces are making a beeline for young men right now, and we’re panicking. We’re manically trying to halt a fast and violent flow - but what if we waded upstream?

That’s what Kay and his colleagues are trying to do. The charity’s mission is to bring good men into the lives of young boys who are living without a father. These men – all volunteers – are committed to being there for the long term (two years, minimum) and to build a trusted friendship. That’s it: the beginning, middle, and end of the mission.

I was struck by the radical simplicity of it. Young boys get referred to Chapter2 through social services, schools, and by family members or guardians – they told me that referrals have never been something they’ve had to work hard to gather. Which is pretty heart breaking in itself.

The reality is, the fatherlessness crisis isn’t going to be solved by State-led intervention, and nor should it be. The solution lies in community living as it should do. It can be helped by the smashing down of hyper-individualism and the dismantling of our obsession with the nuclear family. It can be eased by reminding ourselves that it really does take a village to raise a child. Oh, and that we’re the village. When we spoke, Kay talked about his initial reluctance to found a charity that does this work, weary that it somehow relieves us all of our responsibility to live wide-open lives. Chapter2 is working toward a world in which the mentoring of young, fatherless, boys is normal, not a last resort.

I like that.

The longevity of Chapter2’s goal is pretty counter-cultural, isn’t it? We’re a commitment-phobic-culture. That’s pretty anti-love-your-neighbour, right? But the only way to respond to the wound of abandonment is by showing up – relentlessly, consistently, self-sacrificially. It’s the art of staying – come what may.

I was told that this takes the boys a little getting used to; that Kay and Mansel Lewis warn the men they’re training that there will come a point when the boys will try and push them away, assuming they’ll leave sooner or later and feeling more comfortable having that happen on their own terms. It’s a symptom of the abandonment wound, I guess. But the men stay, and the boys begin to trust them.

And here’s the other biggie for Chapter2: there’s no agenda. No goals. No solutions. No fixing. Just presence - consistent presence.

Again, I was struck by how foreign that must feel to the boys. Everybody else in their life needs and wants something from them – better school attendance, better behaviour at home, less trouble with the police – and rightly so. But the Chapter2 mentors are only interested in the boys’ company and trust. They’re not trying to fix them, they’re just trying to know them – if there are no measurable changes, they’ll still show up. Zero conditions.

The poet, rapper, author, and pastor, Joshua Luke Smith, often talks about a father as being someone who will

‘bind up your wounds and catch you when you fall’,

because that that’s what every young man needs – someone to care enough to do those two things. Because hurt people tend to hurt people. So, wounds need to be bound before they become ‘an excuse to wound others’. Again, it’s all very upstream, don’t you think? It’s very Chapter2-esque.

One Chapter2 mentor recently received a Father’s Day card from a boy he’d built up a relationship with. Another young boy who’d been arrested twenty or so times in twelve months eventually realised, thanks to his mentor, that it’s not worth getting into trouble. His mentor, he said, ‘is someone he can trust, he’s consistent and he knows he cares about him’.

This is community living as it ought to. Is this also the solution to the pandemic of fatherlessness?

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Article

Assisted dying

Care

Comment

Politics

7 May 2025

4 min read

Assisted dying is not a medical procedure; it is a social one

Another vote, and an age-related amendment, highlight the complex community of care.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Graffiti reads 'I miss me' with u crossed out under the 'mem'

Sidd Inban on Unsplash.

Scottish Parliament’s Assisted Dying bill will go to a stage one vote on Tuesday 13th May, with some amendments having been made in response to public and political consultation. This includes the age of eligibility, originally proposed as 16 years. In the new draft of the bill, those requesting assistance to die must be at least 18.

MSPs have been given a free vote on this bill, which means they can follow their consciences. Clearly, amongst those who support it, there is a hope that raising the age threshold will calm the troubled consciences of some who are threatening to oppose. When asked if this age amendment was a response to weakening support, The Times reports that one “seasoned parliamentarian” (unnamed) agreed, and commented:

“The age thing was always there to be traded, a tactical retreat.”

The callousness of this language chills me. Whilst it is well known that politics is more of an art than a science, there are moments when our parliamentarians literally hold matters of life and death in their hands. How can someone speak of such matters as if they are bargaining chips or military manoeuvres? But my discomfort aside, there is a certain truth in what this unnamed strategist says.

When Liam McArthur MSP was first proposed the bill, he already suggested that the age limit would be a point of debate, accepting that there were “persuasive” arguments for raising it to 18. Fortunately, McArthur’s language choices were more appropriate to the subject matter. “The rationale for opting for 16 was because of that being the age of capacity for making medical decisions,” he said, but at the same time he acknowledged that in other countries where similar assisted dying laws are already in operation, the age limit is typically 18.

McArthur correctly observes that at 16 years old young people are considered legally competent to consent to medical procedures without needing the permission of a parent or guardian. But surely there is a difference, at a fundamental level, between consenting to a medical procedure that is designed to improve or extend one’s life and consenting to a medical procedure that will end it?

Viewed philosophically, it would seem to me that Assisted Dying is actually not a medical procedure at all, but a social one. This claim is best illustrated by considering one of the key arguments given for protecting 16- and 17- year-olds from being allowed to make this decision, which is the risk of coercion. The adolescent brain is highly social; therefore, some argue, a young person might be particularly sensitive to the burden that their terminal illness is placing on loved ones. Or worse, socially motivated young people may be particularly vulnerable to pressure from exhausted care givers, applied subtly and behind closed doors.

Whilst 16- and 17- year-olds are considered to have legal capacity, guidance for medical staff already indicates that under 18s should be strongly advised to seek parent or guardian advice before consenting to any decision that would have major consequences. Nothing gets more major than consenting to die, but sadly, some observe, we cannot be sure that a parent or guardian’s advice in that moment will be always in the young person’s best interests. All of this discussion implies that we know we are not asking young people to make just a medical decision that impacts their own body, but a social one that impacts multiple people in their wider networks.

For me, this further raises the question of why 18 is even considered to be a suitable age threshold. If anything, the more ‘adult’ one gets, the more one realises one’s place in the world is part of a complex web of relationships with friends and family, in which one is not the centre. Typically, the more we grow up, the more we respect our parents, because we begin to learn that other people’s care of us has come at a cost to themselves. This is bound to affect how we feel about needing other people’s care in the case of disabling and degenerative illness. Could it even be argued that the risk of feeling socially pressured to end one’s life early actually increases with age? Indeed, there is as much concern about this bill leaving the elderly vulnerable to coercion as there is for young people, not to mention disabled adults. As MSP Pam Duncan-Glancey (a wheelchair-user) observes, “Many people with disabilities feel that they don’t get the right to live, never mind the right to die.”

There is just a fundamental flawed logic to equating Assisted Dying with a medical procedure; one is about the mode of one’s existence in this world, but the other is about the very fact of it. The more we grow, the more we learn that we exist in communities – communities in which sometimes we are the care giver and sometimes we are the cared for. The legalisation of Assisted Dying will impact our communities in ways which cannot be undone, but none of that is accounted for if Assisted Dying is construed as nothing more than a medical choice.

As our parliamentarians prepare to vote, I pray that they really will listen to their consciences. This is one of those moments when our elected leaders literally hold matters of life and death in their hands. Now is not the time for ‘tactical’ moves that might simply sweep the cared-for off of the table, like so many discarded bargaining chips. As MSPs consider making this very fundamental change to the way our communities in Scotland are constituted, they are not debating over the mode of the cared-for’s existence, they are debating their very right to it.