When Andy Hill started to engage schoolboys in masculinity workshops six years ago, he noticed that children didn’t seem to warm to one phrase in particular. “We were trying to address the concept of toxic masculinity,” he says. “It was very common language at that time. But the more work we did with young people, the more we found that when we use this kind of terminology, it just led to this immediate sense of defensiveness.”
Hill is the Creative Director of Voicebox, a charity that aims to help boys aged nine to 16 to thrive against a backdrop of declining school performance, increased scrutiny of misogyny and violence against women and girls, and a broader sense that boys are being left behind. Voicebox is one of several charities that have positioned themselves in recent years as mentors for young men, in part to act as a counterbalance to “harmful ideas of masculinity”.
