What Is Our Plan For Boys

There is a question I started asking when I meet a boy who is angry, disruptive, aggressive or simply difficult to reach.

It is not, “What is wrong with you?”

It is: “What happened to you?”

Those two questions take us in a very different direction. The first looks for a problem in the boy. The second looks for a story.

If we are serious about moving children from hurting to healing, I believe we need to become much better at understanding the stories of the boys in front of us.  It is important to mention that this is not about excusing harmful behaviour. It is not about removing accountability. Boys who hurt others must be held responsible for what they do. BUT accountability without understanding will only take us so far.

We keep looking at boys through the lens of the men they might become so it is easy to see the future perpetrator. We see the behaviour, we see the danger and we see the damage.  And sometimes we forget to see the boy. That is the uncomfortable truth we need to confront: boys can hurt and boys can be hurt. Those two realities can exist at the same time.

A boy can cause harm and still be carrying his own pain. Recognising that does not minimise the harm he has caused. It gives us an opportunity to understand where intervention might have been possible earlier. Because if we only intervene once the damage has happened, we will spend our lives becoming better at repairing damage that perhaps could have been prevented.

My own journey

I know something about this personally. I grew up with an absent father. By the grace of God, my story did not end in prison or a graveyard. But the absence left a deep sense in me that I was not worth fighting for.  That created anger, it influenced my choices and sent me looking for validation in places and through people that were not always healthy.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder how differently my life might have unfolded if there had been a positive male role model who stepped into that space and helped me understand my identity and my worth. That experience eventually became part of why I do the work I do today.

The boy behind the behaviour

Through The Character Company, I have had the privilege of working with hundreds of boys and thousands of interactions, conversations and moments.

I remember one boy in particular. He came into our programme a few years ago. He had no father. His mother was struggling to cope with what was happening in his life, not because she wasn’t a good mother, but because there are things boys sometimes carry that require different kinds of support. He was hurting. He was acting out. He had already been through multiple schools.  It would have been easy to look at him and ask: Why are you so angry? Why are you so difficult? Why don’t you just behave?

Instead, we began asking a different question: What happened to you? What happened that made you believe nobody was going to stay?  What happened that made you believe nobody was going to pitch up?  What happened that made you believe nobody was going to fight for you?

Those questions did not remove his responsibility, but it changed the way we approached him. That distinction is critical because understanding is not excusing. Compassion is not the absence of accountability.  In fact, I believe genuine accountability becomes more possible when a boy has enough safety and trust to face the truth about himself and his behaviour.

What is our plan?

If we genuinely want to prevent harmful behaviour, we need to move further upstream. I believe we need to do three things.

First, make boys a priority:

Not instead of girls. Alongside them. We have rightly become more aware of the vulnerability and harm experienced by girls. But creating balance does not require us to create another imbalance. We cannot ignore the pain of boys and then blame boys for the consequences of that pain.

A boy who is ignored and is hurting does not simply grow out of it. He can grow into a man who is still carrying that hurt. We know the phrase: hurt people hurt people. But perhaps we should also ask:  What happens when hurt people are healed? Healed people can heal people. Safe people create safe spaces. Boys who know they are seen, valued and worth fighting for have a different foundation from boys who have learned that nobody stays.

Second, make mentorship a priority:

Boys are learning what it means to be a man from somewhere. From the men they see, from their peers, from social media, from pornography, from what happens at home and what doesn’t happen at home.

The question is not whether boys will learn what masculinity means. The question is who will teach them?  Mentorship is not simply taking a boy fishing, playing sport or having a conversation now and then. It is helping him understand identity, worth, boundaries, relationships, sexuality, responsibility and the kind of man he wants to become.

It is giving a boy the experience of a positive male role model who stays. That is why The Character Company exists. We don’t simply want to mentor boys, we want to help raise good Godly men.

Third, we need to change the conversation about men.

There are uncomfortable truths about male behaviour that we must confront. Men have a responsibility to address violence, abuse and harmful behaviour. But if every conversation begins and ends with men as the problem, we should not be surprised when men leave the conversation. When men leave the conversation, we lose men from the solution. Men need to hear the pain of women and children. But men also need safe spaces to confront their own pain, shame, failures and responsibility.

We need men who can say: “This is my responsibility” and then do something about it.  Because accountability is not simply about punishment. It is about ownership.

Fourth:

If I could throw in a bonus 4^th point it would be to remove access to smart phones for our children until way into high school but more on that sensitive matter at another time.

We cannot keep repairing downstream

Though there are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work in child protection, trauma, family support and healing, many of them are exhausted. They keep arriving at the burning building, they keep rescuing people from the fire and when they finally walk home, they still carry the smell of smoke.

SO, when do we start asking a different question? When do we stop building so many fires? When do we invest further upstream? When do we decide that raising healthy boys is not a nice-to-have, but part of prevention? When do we decide that mentorship, positive male role models, safe spaces, accountability and character development belong in the conversation about child protection?

We cannot keep meeting boys only when they are already in crisis. We need to meet them earlier, we need to see them earlier, we need to listen earlier and we need to teach them that their choices matter.

What is our plan for boys?

That is the question I want us to wrestle with. Not only: What do we do when a boy hurts someone? But: What are we doing today to raise a boy who will not hurt someone tomorrow?

Because the boy who may become a perpetrator tomorrow is still a boy today. Today, we have an opportunity to see him, to hear him, to challenge him, to hold him accountable, to give him boundaries, to give him belonging. To give him a community that stays and perhaps most importantly, to give him the experience of knowing: You are worth fighting for.

But also:  You are responsible for what you do with the life you have been given. That is where vulnerability can become accountability. Accountability can become commitment and commitment can become character.

If we want to move children from hurting to healing, we cannot only become better at healing, we have to become better at raising boys who don’t hurt. So, perhaps the question is not simply what is wrong with our boys.

Perhaps the question is:  What is our plan for boys?