‘The leaders Gareth Southgate called for are already fighting society’s toxic masculinity’

Thankfully, the leaders called for by Gareth Southgate are already out there.

Men like Sayce Holmes Lewis, the founder and CEO of Mentivity, set up years ago to inspire parents, schools and young people to overcome barriers and fulfil their potential. Emmanuel Wallace – known to his followers as Big Manny – using his Masters degree in Biomedical Sciences to make science relevant to young people across social media. Or like Zac Dugdale whose Talkback and Sides group offered free haircuts with frank guidance to kids embroiled in knife crime in Bristol. Women like Brooke Kinsella who vowed never to give up the fight against knife crime after the death of her brother Ben in 2008.

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Or Ceylon Hickman, head co-ordinator of Football Beyond Borders which uses the power of sport to motivate and inspire children in schools across the country. Mark Prince is channelling the pain of losing his 16-year-old son Kiyan into ensuring other kids and their families do not suffer the same trauma.

Ben Lindsay, CEO of award-winning charity Power the Fight, tackling violence affecting young people and creating long-term, sustainable solutions. Or Faron Paul, committed to making the country’s streets safer by heading into the toughest neighbourhoods and taking deadly weapons away from the kids intent on using them.

Alex Holmes, awarded the OBE for his peer-to-peer anti-bullying programme which has trained 50,000 young people across 5,000 schools, and has also been used in schools in France and Greece.

Or Julian George whose Future Plate network discovers, nurtures and promotes some of the best male and female chefs in the country.

Solomon Smith, co-founder and CEO of the Brixton Soup Kitchen, who has motivated young people and volunteers to feed nearly 500,000 homeless people across south London for nearly a decade.

Or Dean Forbes, raised in a single parent household, homeless after his release as a teenager from Crystal Palace football club and now the chairman of the Forbes Family Group.

Leon Mann’s BCOMS network has opened up pathways into the media for thousands of young people from ordinary backgrounds.

Football fans able to put their tribal loyalties to one side recognise the scale of Robbie Lyle’s achievement, building the multi-million pound DR Sports network up from the ground. Empowering and employing hundreds of young people, spawning similar platforms across the land and influencing the way sport is consumed in this country.

The leaders are out there. I’ve included quite a few – across gender and culture to emphasise the point. You probably have some of your own. By all means, let me know.

Because while the threat of the toxic influence is a real danger to our kids, the leaders are out there. I’ve met them. I’ve worked with some of them.

They identify talent early, build sustainable, long term networks and create their own platforms when the establishment won’t fund them or allow them a look in.

Inspiring the vulnerable away from the wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Not just motivating teenagers to put down the knives or to stay away from substances, gaming or gambling. Replacing those vices with virtue, ambition and a sense of purpose.

Not every prognosis on our society has to be negative. Lives are being saved and turned around. Aspirations are being awakened and nurtured.

So many of us parents across the country have been alive to the infections attempting to eat away at our kids’ childhoods for years.

Many of us have been warned since we were kids by our own parents to put that work in. Saturday schools have been around for decades with parents determined not to allow the failings of the decaying state system to hold their children back.

Gone are the days when parents would feel they’ve somehow “sold out” by sending their kids to private school if they could afford it. Better than than have their youngsters in the kind of secondary school madhouse so powerfully and accurately depicted in the Netflix hit Adolescence.

Better to ignore the duplicitous politicians actively selling out the lower and middle classes whose votes they begged for and opt for sane schools with smaller class sizes, motivated teachers and a respect for authority.

Parents and leaders have been proactively working to combat the toxic influences threatening their kids for years. They’ve stuck with it while politicians, commentators and the news agenda have thrown their hands up in the air, demanded answers on furious phone-ins – then moved on to the next thing.

Because we’ve known for years that our society is rotting away under a diet of football, social media and reality TV.

We’ve known for years that the youngsters arrested in their early teens for murder are nowhere near the rarity they used to be. Adolescence has shocked the complacent Boomer generation but the truth has been out there. They’ve just not seen it.

Respect for authority has disintegrated, replaced by outrageous attention-seeking, on and offline.

Violence is commonplace to the point of expected. Anger and bravado bubble under in the line of everything you read online.

The trickle of sex, for years used to sell everyday products, has become a flood.

The overseas tech giants have had no compunction about removing the shackles from the boundaries of taste and decency from the kind of thing your kids and mine are being offered.

Tariffs are even being threatened on this country if the Online Safety Bill tries to put the padlocks back on.

So yes. The applause, likes and retweets to send Southgate’s observations viral this week are understandable.

They’ve crystallised what so many have been thinking. But the brutal reality is that, already, they are being wiped out by the football.

Instead of exploring ways to take the conversation forward, football fans were debating the style of football Southgate’s successor, Thomas Tuchel, wants to play with the England team against Albania on Friday night.

The news agenda is now focusing on, quite rightly, the developments in the Stephen Lawrence case, the Heathrow power outage which has robbed millions of people of their holidays.

And the debate around Adolescence has been dragged by the usual suspects into territories that deliberately ignore the core issues and tries to turn people against each other.

It moves on that quickly. That fast.

So Southgate’s timing is, as ever, impeccable. We all have work to do protecting our kids from the toxic influences.

Let’s just remember the people already doing that work. Committed to changing lives and inspiring generations.

ends

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