ON the way to the activity wing of Polmont Young Offenders Institute – through locked doors and up and down stairs – there is a long corridor with full-length windows on which single words are etched onto the glass. Hope, says one. Believe. Inspire.
The hope is that today’s prison workshop on masculinity and attitudes to rising rates of online-fuelled misogyny, attended today by five young men serving time here, will inspire real and lasting change.
This “positive masculinity” package was developed by the prison’s community safety team and Iain Corbett, youth worker and participation advisor for Strathclyde University’s Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice, has been delivering it for several months. Some 48 young men have taken part so far.
Over the next hour, inmates will explore what it means to be a man, so-called toxic masculinity and the part they play in the sharp rise in online-fuelled misogyny. The Ferret has been allowed to sit in on the stipulation that we don’t identify the prisoners attending.
Across Western society, there is growing concern about how to counter rising levels of hostility to women, turbo-charged by the so-called manosphere, a network of interconnected misogynistic websites and online communities that use social media algorithms to target young men. Scotland is no different. So could this approach make a difference?
The consequences of this culture war-fuelled increase can be deadly. Jake Davison, 22, from Plymouth who killed five people in a mass shooting including his own mother in 2021, was revealed to have deeply misogynistic views and fascination with incel culture, an online movement of “involuntarily celibate” young men who blame women for their problems.
According to Shout Out UK, that was one of an estimated eight mass murders globally in the last 10 years by men either identifying as incels or posting related ideas online, which caused 61 deaths. In August this year, UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper promised extreme misogyny would be treated as a form of extremism under new government plans.
But Corbett, who had experience with gangs and the criminal justice system as a teenager, is not interested in hectoring men about toxic traits. Instead, he takes a community development approach – opening up discussion and allowing participants to reach their own conclusions.
He starts by getting the young men – some of whom he’s known for years from youth work in the community – on their feet for a mental warm-up. He’ll give two options, ask participants to pick a side and argue the toss.
Cats or dogs? Pizza or pasta? “Ooo that’s a hard one,” someone groans. But they amaze Corbett by all opting for pasta. Rangers or Celtic? Boxing or wrestling? Muhammad Ali or Mike Tyson? Biggie or Tupac? Both Tyson and Tupac have sexual assault convictions. The boys begin to sense where this is going but Corbett doesn’t linger … yet.
“Mums or dads,” he says. All of the young men chose team mum.
“What’s the dads done wrong?” asks Corbett.
“Mums and sons just have a bond,” suggests one. There’s a pause.
“My da fucked off on us,” says another quietly.
“Solid reason,” concedes Iain softly.
They know the next one is a set-up. Men or women? “I feel like this is a trap,” one laughs. “Okay, you’re right,” says Corbett. He invites them to take a seat and opens up the discussion about misogyny. These young men don’t struggle with the definition. “It means to hate women,” says one.
“Do you think you’re part of the problem?” asks Corbett. Most scoff but one young man thinks there’s something in it. “You’ve got to ask yourself if you are actually being part of the change,” he offers.
It’s not long before the infamous social media influencer and self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, who is facing charges of rape and sex trafficking, comes up. Most are critical but one insists he’s worth listening to. According to polling by King’s College in February this year, that’s as expected. Researchers found one in five men between 18 and 29 approves of Tate.
Corbett returns to some of the examples of abusers from the warm-up game. Though the boys had acknowledged their convictions they’d also defended their prowess in the boxing ring or on the mic. So what makes the boys forgive them, Corbett asks, when they would shun anyone in jail accused of sexual violence?
Then he takes it up a notch. “Any of you know who Sarah Everard was?” he asks them. They remember she was abducted, raped and killed by a policeman. The room has a different tone now, more serious and attentive.
Corbett passes around a front page of The Northern Echo from September 21. It is covered in small square images of some of the 80 women allegedly killed by men in the six months following Everard’s death.
“Do you know how many women were killed by women in that same period?” he asks them.
“Five?” offers one.
Corbett makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger. “Zilch.” In a three-year period between March 2021 and March 2023, almost all homicide suspects – 92% – were men.
He puts some of this together for them. “We know that men can be violent and the police are meant to protect women against that. But we have cases where police are the perpetrators of violence. We say we don’t ever forgive rapists. But when sports stars or rappers are rapists, we still celebrate them. What do you think that’s like for women?” he asks.
“I can dig what you’re saying”, says one young man. “You know how there’s, like, groups for women? What about the men setting up a group to support women? Like you know, standing up?”
Corbett wants to know: “Would you go to something like that? They are sceptical. “Only if it had affected someone that you love,” says one.
“What if I told you,” continues Corbett. “That every woman you know has been affected – your mums, your grans, your sisters, your friends and girlfriends …”
“It’s not nice to hear,” says one.
He persists. “Do you believe me?”
“I know it’s true.”
“So what do we do?”
“We need to get to the drawing board,” someone says. “And find a solution.”
Many would argue that with that solution still elusive, the burden has fallen instead on women and girls to do the work and protect themselves.
As Dame Helena Kennedy – echoing feminists before her – wrote in her introduction to the Scottish Government working group on misogyny that she chaired in 2022: “Girls are warned from childhood that they must avoid putting themselves in harm’s way, that it is THEY who must learn behaviours that might afford them protection from predatory or violent men.”
Corbett aims to make sure young men feel the responsibility to help change things and hopes that preventing men like this from being radicalised might be an important part of the solution.
Part of that, he says, is giving them tools to work out the real root of their anger and who is really benefitting from their disaffection. Many he works with have been raised in deprived communities surrounded by violence, or even in care, so, he explains, they might have reasons to be angry. But they need to understand that vulnerability can be manipulated.
There are high-profile people who are still pushing the myth that men are being wrongly blamed when in fact they are the victims of feminism, Corbett says. “And when that’s the only narrative being heard then young men are at risk of buying into that.
“Who is the counter influencer to that type of masculinity? Until we start offering something else up, then you can understand why men are buying into something seductive that’s presented to them.”
Misogyny dates back to ancient times. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that the term was popularised by second-wave feminism, which arose in the context of anti-war and civil rights movements in the US and spread to other Western countries.
Lisa Sugiura, an associate professor in cybercrime and gender at Plymouth University, says that you can date the so-called manosphere back to then too. “The early men’s liberation movement was an ally of second-wave feminism, recognising that the patriarchy was damaging to everyone,” she says.
“It was a splinter group – the men’s rights movement – that took umbrage with that. That mentality and defensiveness has just grown and grown. And what technology has done is allowed the mobilisation of those ideas to grow and be presented as something new, as if it’s a contemporary issue.”
The term “manosphere”, though, dates back to about 2009. It still includes men’s rights activists who share the belief that feminism has stripped men of their rights and privileges, transferring them to women. But there are also pick-up artists (PUAs) often offering men expensive “structured teachings” on how to coerce women into having sex with them.
Tate is one of them though he’s best known as a manosphere influencer. According to the Centre For Countering Digital Hate, he has “manipulated algorithms to flood his followers with misogynistic videos”. In November 2022, the organisation’s analysis identified more than 100 accounts that frequently promote content featuring Tate on TikTok, with a total of 250 million video views and 5.7 million followers.
Other factions include the fatalistic incel movement which blames women for their lack of sexual relationships and promotes content that crosses with far-right ideology and “men going their own way” (MGTOW) which claims Western society is rigged against men.
“Those influencers are really taking advantage of socio-political issues,” explains Sugiura. “It involves a misogynistic re-framing of feminism as the root cause of what’s gone wrong for men and boys.”
Boys and young men are the demographic targets of this misinformation campaign, adds Sugiura. She also sees the sharp rise in misogyny as “a backlash to progression”, part of the culture wars played out online but with real-world consequences, like the 2022 overturning of the landmark Roe v Wade ruling, protecting the right to abortion, and the rise of the far-right.
Increasingly, says Dr Rebecca Mason, research and policy lead for The Young Women’s Movement, young men are being “captured and groomed by men online, often much older than them, to blame and harm women and girls for the wrongs that exist in their life”.
“For years, parents, youth workers and teachers have been reporting that young men and boys are increasingly at risk of being radicalised,” she explains.
Young women are experiencing the normalisation of violence and coercion, she says, from having intimate images of them circulated to being abusively shut down in online spaces. In a joint research project with Scottish Women’s Aid, they found more than a third aged 16 to 25 had been in an intimate relationship with someone who was abusive.
But she is aware too, of the harm on stereotypical “masculine” traits – such as violence and shutting down emotions – on boys and young men. In 2023, there were 590 male suicide deaths, up 6% on the previous year. The rate for men has been consistently between 2.6 and 3.6 times higher than women since records began in 1994.
While she is clear that work with young men “should not detract or take any resource away from work with young women” she says it’s time to bring young men into the conversation and offer meaningful alternatives and empathy. It’s a view backed by their 30-strong advisory collective of women under 30, who prefer the term “healthy” masculinity over what they consider to be an overly binary push for positivity.
In recent years, projects looking to foster that have been emerging. Last May, YouthLink Scotland, working with community safety programme No Knives Better Lives, launched its Imagine A Man programme, including a research report and tool kit, aimed at supporting youth workers to promote more positive visions of masculinity.
“The research shows we absolutely have to be creating fun, non-judgemental environments for young people to talk about experiences of masculinity,” explains Rachel Adamson, Zero Tolerance co-director. Without those, she warns, young men are “disappearing into online forums” that start with “banter” but get “very dark, very quickly”.
But attitudinal work can only take us so far, she concedes. “We also need to continue the structural and systemic work on laws and on policies and implementing those on the ground. It’s all connected.”
Davy Thompson, director of the White Ribbon Campaign, which encourages men to take a stand against male violence, is sure that with a combination of approaches, change is possible.
Forty years ago, he notes, you’d never go out for the night with a designated driver who was going to stay sober.
“The change that led to people stopping drink driving was underpinned by a change in the law,” he says. “But the change in attitudes was also important.” The same, he says, can be true of misogyny.
“What’s really important is women and men working together,” he says. “And this being led by communities.” But that needs resources and in the current climate, it’s hard to see where these might come from.
Back at Polmont, Iain Corbett is bringing the session to a close.
“How do we start making change then?” he asks.
“Everyone has to get involved with it,” says one young man. Another leans forward. “The way men see women now is different from the 1920s, than the 1950s or even the 1970s,” he says. “So it takes time, but I really think that it is possible.”
The prison guard’s earpiece crackles into life. “Time to move,” she says, and they are taken back to their cells. Corbett stands up too.
“The reality is happy young men, well rounded, regulated and emotionally literate aren’t going out doing bad things,” he says. “What we are trying to do here is help these young men to work on being the best versions of themselves.”
