Lost boys and marriages – what nobody’s saying…
Something is going badly wrong for Britain’s boys. Not in one area of life – in every area. I sat down with Luke Taylor, researcher at the Centre for Social Justice, to talk about three years of work that maps just how serious this has become. Luke is also part of the 2% - a young man who got married in his twenties, bucking a trend his own research documents. Watch the full conversation here.
The numbers in the CSJ’s Lost Boys report, published March 2025, are hard to sit with. Boys trail girls at every stage of education from nursery to university, where women now outnumber men by three to two. The number of young men aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment, or training rose by 40% since the pandemic, compared to 7% for young women. Two and a half million children in this country have no father figure at home. Among children in custody, 76% had an absent father. Those are not abstract statistics. It is the state of a lost generation.
The follow-up report on men and culture found that more than three-quarters of people think teenage boys lack proper role models in popular culture. Over half of men do not feel that being a man is “something to be proud of”. Luke names the problem plainly: “We almost got to the stage where we talked about toxic masculinity so much we were at risk of making masculinity itself sound toxic.”
A recent report, Boyhood, points back to fathers and families. It recommends retaining the legal presumption of parental involvement, automatically naming fathers on birth certificates, and using Family Hubs to engage dads. The thread running through all three reports is the same: boys need men around them, and marriage is how most of those men stay.
That is exactly where the CSJ’s I Do? report lands. Marriages have fallen from over 400,000 a year in the early 1970s to 224,402 in 2023 – the lowest since records began in the 1850s. Among men under 25, the marriage rate has collapsed by 98%. A young married man is now in the top 2% of his age group. A pensioner is now more likely to marry than a young man. Luke is refreshingly blunt: marriage has been “undefended” – not just underfunded.
The institution that does most to keep fathers in the home, that gives boys the stable foundation they need to become men, is the one we have spent fifty years quietly letting go. Real man-woman marriage matters. It always has. And it is not too late to say so. In fact, there’s little of greater importance right now.