‘We’ve seen Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Luke Skywalker [and] The Equalizer all replaced by women and men are left with the Krays and [Peaky Blinders’] Tommy Shelby,’ Tory MP Nick Fletcher lamented during a debate in Westminster Hall on Thursday.
Without skipping a beat, he continued: ‘Is it any wonder we’re seeing so many young men committing crime?’
As a published author and academic researcher who specialises in prisons, masculinity and education, my first thought was that this misinformed view would be amusing if it wasn’t so tragic.
Trying to reduce the experiences of young men committing crime and ending up in prisons to eroding male role models on screen is just simplistic – and wrong.
I’m thankful that, at the very least, this has opened up a much needed conversation about men, masculinity and crime and why a view like this is dangerously inaccurate.
Throughout my professional career, I’ve spent a lot of time researching and working with men involved in crime, exclusion and prison. And none of the people I’ve met have ever said that they ended up where they are because Jodie Whittaker stepped into the role of Doctor Who in 2017.
It’s a lot more complex than that.
Let’s take as an example one young man who was part of a wider study I was involved in. He started getting involved with crime at the age of 10 while living in a deprived neighbourhood in the deindustrialised north. He was constantly being taken home by police throughout his adolescence, and subsequently was placed into a very broken care system. After multiple exclusions from schools in an area with one of the worst performing local education authorities he eventually landed in prison at the age of 15 years old.
This was the start of his revolving door cycle of imprisonment.
Other men in the study report moving from the violence of their streets to the highly volatile and impoverished young adult prison estate. One 15-year-old young man told the story of an older cell mate with serious mental health issues, who woke him up in the middle of the night bullwhipping him with a wet towel to the face – this was his first night in prison.
The idea that they were failed and their criminal trajectories set by a lack of positive male role models in popular culture is so far removed from this reality. They’re living real lives in real spaces navigating profound structural challenges.
It’s important to recognise that our prison population has been around 95% male for a very long time. Almost all crime – especially violent crime – is committed by men. More than half of male prisoners have no qualifications whatsoever, while 34% of all prisoners were screened as being below the level of an 11-year-old in English education.