Boys should be taught how to wrestle to reduce knife crime and other serious violence, a former Tory MP has said.
Miriam Cates said boys ‘need rough and tumble’ otherwise they may take out their aggression in other ways.
The mother-of-three, considered a rising star in the party before losing her seat in last year’s election, said society had ‘forgotten’ that boys and girls are different.
The former need to be able to express their ‘innate’ characteristics of ‘aggression’, ‘courageousness’ and ‘competitiveness’ in a controlled environment to help them succeed in life, she said.
She was speaking at the launch of a report, Lost Boys, by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think tank.
It argues that there is a crisis engulfing British males who are being ‘left behind’, with absent fathers identified as one of the issues.
It also warns that young men earn less on average than their female counterparts in a striking reversal of the gender pay gap.
‘We need to teach our young boys to wrestle,’ Ms Cates said at the report’s launch in Westminster.
Mother-of-three and former Tory MP Miriam Cates has said boys ‘need rough and tumble’ otherwise they may take out their aggression in other ways
Ms Cates suggested wrestling as an outlet for teenage boys
Ms Cates has argued that wrestling can help boys ‘harness’ their ‘natural aggression’ and turn them away from violent crimes
She added: ‘One of the things that Joel [from charity Lads Need Dads] does is just wrestle with these young boys, because how is a boy supposed to learn how to have self-control over his natural ability to fight if he doesn’t learn that by fighting someone who is older and stronger?
‘That’s how boys learn, isn’t it? It’s by wrestling people they can’t actually hurt.
‘If the first fight you have is a real one, and you stab someone, you’re going to go to prison.
‘But if you’ve been taught to control that natural aggression and harness it positively, you will become a courageous young man.
‘I don’t know if any of you have watched the BBC series SAS Rogue Heroes – that’s what men can do, and that’s what we need to be able to say that men are good for…they need rough and tumble.
‘They need to be able to express their competitiveness. If we pretend they don’t need that and they can just be treated like girls and turn into young men, that would be a mistake and I think that’s where we’ve gone wrong.’
The report outlines how the proportion of young men compared to young women failing to move from education into employment or training has been steadily growing for thirty years.
Since the pandemic alone, the number of males aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training (Neet) has increased by a staggering 40 per cent compared to just seven per cent of females.
