The Lost Boys
On the universal boy who is being crushed before he can become the noble man. On the Congo, my brother, Andrew Tate, and what these boys are actually starved for.
I have been thinking about a boys.
All of the boys. The ones we are losing right now, in plain sight, while the world that should have raised them looks the other way.
The fourteen-year-old in his bedroom in Manchester or Minneapolis or Mumbai, alone with his phone, an algorithm doing its work on his nervous system.
The seventeen-year-old in a Minnesota high school who just got an email from a National Guard recruiter telling him that enlisting could keep ICE from taking his mother.
The twenty-two-year-old who has just been hired by ICE itself, who applied along with eighty thousand others when the age cap was removed in August.
The boy in the men’s group chat passing around the Tate clip. The boy who shot the woman he had been told he was entitled to.
But I have also been thinking about the boy in our kitchen.
My older brother. Angry, lost, needing direction and holding that did not come, missing our mum in a way that was somehow even more excruciating than mine. I have written about him before. I have not written about the boy inside him.
I have been thinking about that boy a lot.
The Boys Who Broke My heart
And I have been thinking about the boys I met more than a decade ago in the eastern Congo, when I was working with the City of Joy and the women on its staff team, sharing a trauma healing curriculum I had developed called the Safe Embrace. The City of Joy is the sanctuary V founded in Bukavu for women survivors of the genocidal sexual violence that has been used as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for thirty years. The women on the staff there have lived through what no human being should live through.
But the boys I want to tell you about, I met at the hospital. Panzi Hospital, also in Bukavu, the hospital Dr. Denis Mukwege built and tends, where the women who have survived the violence go for the surgical repair and medical care their bodies need before any of the rest of the healing can begin. The hospital is the first ground. It is where the body is given back to itself.
The boys I met there were the boys who had done the violence. Or boys like them.
They were former child soldiers. Stolen from their villages when they were nine, ten, eleven. Forcibly recruited into the factional guerrilla groups that have run the eastern Congo as a charnel house for decades. Shamed, beaten, intimidated, and broken into doing horrendous acts of violence against women. By twelve, thirteen, fourteen, they had done things their nervous systems could not metabolise and their souls could not yet understand. By fifteen, sixteen, some of them had been rescued. Pulled out by NGOs, returned to villages that did not want them back, given to programmes that were trying to reintegrate boys who had committed atrocities into communities that had been on the receiving end of them.
When I met some of these boys, they had been in the programmes for a few years. They had done their grief work, in whatever way the programmes could carry them through it. They had been received, witnessed, slowly returned to themselves by elders who refused to write them off.
And they were playing drums at the hospital.
For the women.
I want you to see this image with me, my loves. Because it is one of the most theologically loaded images I have ever stood inside.
The hospital where the women were being put back together. Surgical wards, recovery rooms, the slow medical work of mending bodies that had been catastrophically violated. The women in their hospital beds and their hospital gowns, lying in the ground floor of healing where the body itself is being given back to them. And the boys, formerly soldiers, formerly the hands of the violence, sitting at the edge of the ward, playing the drums.
Holding the rhythm for the women whose bodies they had been part of breaking.
That is what initiation actually looks like. That is what the noble masculine actually looks like, when it has been recovered from the broken boy. He does not arrive in his glory and apologise. He sits down at the edge of the hospital ward and plays the drums for the women he has hurt, and he does it for as long as it takes, and his body slowly learns what his hands were always for.
I have been carrying that image for over a decade. It comes back to me now because what we are watching unfold across the western world is what happens when there is no one to do that work with the boys.
A word before I begin
I am writing in the language of women and men because the cultural wound has been enacted along that binary, and because the lineages I work inside are polarity cosmologies. These are a few traditions among many. There are cosmologies that do not run on polarity, and humans whose interior experience is not held by these poles. The teaching here is one way of describing reality. It is not the only way. Take what serves and leave what does not.
What the data actually says
Let me name what is happening, because it has to be named clearly before we can talk about what is underneath it.
Eighty per cent of British boys aged sixteen and seventeen have consumed content created by Andrew Tate. Only sixty per cent of boys in the same age group have heard of the British Prime Minister. Read that twice. They know the misogynist influencer better than they know the head of their own government. Fifty-six per cent of young fathers under thirty-five in the UK approve of him.
Forty per cent of adult American men, and half of younger American men, say they trust one or more men’s rights, anti-feminist, or pro-violence voices from the manosphere. Two-thirds of young men regularly engage with masculinity influencers online. Two-thirds of young men say no one really knows me.
Far-right extremism in the West has risen by two hundred and fifty per cent in the last five years. Radicalisation that once took months or years now typically takes days, sometimes hours, because the short-form algorithm has been engineered for it. Teachers in Canada are reporting misogynist and extremist beliefs in students as young as eleven and twelve.
Last year in the UK, a young man named Kyle Clifford murdered his ex-partner, her sister, and her mother. Within twenty-four hours of the killings, he had watched videos by Andrew Tate. The judge at trial called Tate a poster boy for misogynists.
Meanwhile, in August of last year, the Department of Homeland Security removed all age caps for ICE recruitment. Anyone over eighteen can now apply. The agency received over eighty thousand applications in the first week. The goal is to hire ten thousand new immigration officers, backed by nearly thirty billion dollars in federal funding. Boys who were in high school last year are now being trained to disappear other people’s mothers from grocery store parking lots.
And in Minneapolis in January, a National Guard recruiter sent an email to around two hundred high school students with the subject line I know it is scary out there, pointing to ICE operations and telling the students that if they enlisted, they might be able to keep ICE from taking their parents.
This is what the recruitment of the next generation of young men looks like in 2026. The manosphere on one side, taking the lonely ones into misogyny and far-right radicalisation through the algorithm. The state security apparatus on the other side, taking the frightened ones into enforcement work through the threat of what will happen to their mothers if they refuse. And in between, the boys.
The boys are being harvested.
They are not lost because they hate
I want to be careful here, because the easy story is the wrong story.
The boys joining the manosphere are not joining because they hate women. Not at the beginning. Most of them arrive looking for advice on fitness, on dating, on how to make money, on how to be a man in a world that has stopped teaching them what that means. The misogyny is not the entry point. The misogyny is what they are taught once they have arrived inside an ecosystem that has them captive.
The boys joining ICE are not joining because they hate immigrants. Many of them are immigrants themselves, or sons of immigrants. They are joining because there is a paycheck. Because there is a uniform. Because somebody told them that putting on that uniform would make them somebody. Because the alternative is the slow grind of underemployment and loneliness and the suspicion, never quite spoken, that nobody has ever actually seen them as a man.
The boy in our kitchen, my brother, was not angry because he was bad. He was angry because his mum had been sick most of his life, his dad was overwhelmed, the village had not gathered around him, and there was no man in his world who could say to him I see you, you are mine, I will walk you through this. He was a boy who had been left to figure it out, and what a boy left to figure it out usually finds is a hard surface he can hit until he forgets what he is missing.
The men on Motherless were once boys whose tenderness was shamed out of them so completely that they cannot, as adults, bear to be witnessed by a whole woman with her eyes open. The men in the Epstein files were once boys who learned, somewhere, that intimacy was a thing to be taken rather than something to be entered together. The men passing the legislation against women’s bodies are sitting in the gerontocracy of broken boys, none of whom were ever called into the noble masculine by an older man who could have done it.
Andrew Tate himself was once a boy. His father, the chess master Emory Tate, was a complicated man, and Andrew grew up between Chicago and Luton, in a household and a culture that produced the man he became. The misogyny he sells now is the misogyny of a boy who learned, somewhere very young, that the only way to survive the wound of his own tenderness was to weaponise it against women. He is what happens when no one reaches the boy. He is now the recruiting officer for the next generation of unreached boys.
This is what we are looking at , its systemic, my loves.
The boys are not lost because they hate. They are lost because they are starving. And what they are starving for is the same thing my brother was starving for in our kitchen. The same thing the boys in the eastern Congo had been starving for when the guerrilla groups found them. The same thing the seventeen-year-old in Minneapolis is starving for when the recruiter writes to him with the subject line I know it is scary out there.
They are starving to be seen. To be received. To be initiated into something real. To be told, by an adult man they respect, what their strength is for.
When no one reaches them, the algorithm reaches them. The recruiter reaches them. The Tate brothers reach them. The militia reaches them. The Discord server reaches them. Someone always reaches them, because every boy has to belong somewhere, and a boy who is not gathered into the noble masculine is, by simple physics, going to be gathered into something else.
The boys are not the problem.
The vacuum is the problem.
The boy inside the man
I want to say something now that I have been saying for years and that I want to say again, because it is the diagnosis that holds the whole system together.
The boy is in there.
In every man we are watching hurt women, abuse children, bully his way into more power, legislate against bodies that are not his, post in the manosphere, drug his wife, knock on the door at six in the morning to deport his neighbours. The boy is in there. The boy who was crushed before he had a chance to grow into the noble man. The boy whose tenderness was shamed. The boy whose grief was mocked. The boy whose body learned that softness was a way to be eaten.
That boy did not disappear. He went underground. He hardened. He learned to perform a version of himself that the locker room and the playground and the family dinner could not destroy. And now, in middle age, in the late thirties, in the sixties and the seventies, he is running the world from inside a body that has been carrying him since he was nine.
What we are seeing in public is the visible expression of the boy in private. Andrew Tate is a boy. The man at the legislature is a boy. The man on Motherless is a boy. The man in the boardroom who cannot make eye contact with the woman he has been working alongside for a decade is a boy. They are all the same boy at different amplitudes, expressing through different surfaces, in different costumes, with different access to power. But the wound is one wound. The crushing is one crushing.
This is the part that almost nobody can bear to look at, because if it is true, it asks something of us. It asks us to see, in the most monstrous-seeming behaviour, the boy who was never reached. Not to excuse him. Not to absolve him. To diagnose him correctly. Because if the diagnosis is correct, the intervention can be correct. And the intervention is not more punishment for the grown man. The intervention is reaching the boy.
The boy who is currently fourteen.
The boy who is currently twenty-two and applying to ICE.
The boy who is currently fifty-six and has been a man on paper for forty years and has never, not once, been seen by an older man as the boy he still is.
All of them need the same thing.
What these boys need
This is very close to my heart and I have been saying in my other articles in particular What Happens When the World is Fatherless. But I want to say it again because I think it is so important.
They need to be seen. Not lectured to. Seen, as the boys they are, by adult men and women who can hold what they actually carry without flinching.
They need elders. Men who have done their own work. Men who have crossed thresholds and come back changed. Men who have stopped pretending. Men who can say to a boy I see who you are. I see what you are carrying. Come sit with me. I will walk you through this.
They need rites of passage. Real ones. Not the empty corporate version, not the abstract spiritual version. The kind where a boy is taken away from his mother and his phone and his algorithm, by a circle of older men, and put through something difficult, and brought back changed, and presented to his community as a young man with a name and a place at the fire.
They need ritual, music, drumming, work, the physical body, the hands doing something that matters. The Congo boys playing drums at the hospital is not a metaphor. It is the actual structure. The body learning what it was always for through repetition, presence, witness, and time.
They need men’s circles. Not the corporate networking version. The real one. Older men gathering younger men around fires, around tables, around grief, around the work of becoming a noble man. Boys to Men Mentoring has done this with fifteen thousand boys. The Brotherhood Program. Journeymen. The Becoming A Man programme that started in Chicago and now runs in over two hundred schools across America, Boston, Kansas City, Dallas, Washington DC, London. Coaching Boys Into Men, where athletic coaches are trained to do the work because for many boys the coach is the closest thing to a father they have. These programmes exist. They are working. They are wildly underfunded. They are the thing that actually moves boys away from the manosphere and into something whole.
They need fathers who have done their own work. Not heroes. Fathers. Men who have sat with their own father wound, their own mother wound, their own shame, and come back capable of being present to their sons. This is the longest work and the most necessary one. The fathers of the next generation of boys are the men who are currently in their thirties and forties, many of whom have never been initiated themselves. They cannot give what they have not received. They have to receive it first.
They need mothers who can hold them as boys without trying to make them into the men they have already failed to be. A mother who can mother her son into his own becoming, who can love him fiercely without taking responsibility for his manhood, who can call in the father, the uncle, the elder, the men’s circle, the rites of passage programme, the mentor. The mothers cannot do the men’s work, but the mothers can refuse to do it for them, and that refusal is part of how the boys are released into the work of becoming.
They need the older men to come back into the room. This is the most urgent ask of this moment, and I want to be direct about it. The older men in this culture have largely retreated. Some out of disenfranchisement, some out of fatigue, some out of the unkind cultural air that has made being an older man feel like a kind of unwelcome. I understand the impulse. The seclusion is not the answer. The boys are being lost to ICE recruiters and militias and Andrew Tate because the older men withdrew, and the void you left has been filled by people who profit from your absence. The boys are looking for fathers and elders and finding only people who monetise their loneliness. You can do better than that. They need you to.
To the mothers of sons
I want to say something specifically to the mothers, because I know many of you are reading this with a fourteen-year-old in your house, watching what is moving through him, terrified.
You are not crazy. What you are sensing is real. The algorithm has him. The Discord server has him. The boy at school who has been getting deeper into the manosphere has him. The Tate clip his cousin sent him last week has him. You can feel him slipping, in small ways, and you cannot quite find the words to reach him.
I want to say two things to you.
The first is that this is not yours to fix alone. You cannot mother him into manhood. That is not a failure on your part. That is the architecture. Boys need to be initiated by older men into the noble masculine, and that work cannot be done by mothers, even the most fierce and present mothers in the world. What you can do is refuse to let the algorithm and the Tate brothers be the only voices reaching him. You can find the men’s circle, the mentor, the coach, the uncle, the godfather, the rites of passage programme. Bring them in. The men who are doing this work want to be doing it. Many of them are sitting around waiting for boys to be sent to them.
The second is that you have to keep loving him. Even when he is performing the Tate posture in your kitchen. Even when he is repeating things that frighten you. Even when his eyes go cold for a moment and you do not recognise him. The boy is still in there. The boy still needs his mother. Not to agree with the posture, not to soften your truth, not to manage his feelings. Just to keep loving the boy underneath the costume, while also refusing the costume itself.
Your love alone will not bring him home. But your love is part of the architecture that can hold him while the men do their work. Hold the line. Find the men. Refuse the algorithm. Pray, light a candle, keep him in your fierce attention. The boy is still reachable. He has not gone yet.
What we do now
There is grounded action available, my loves. Let me name some of it.
Find a mentoring or rites of passage programme.
The Becoming A Man (BAM) programme at Youth Guidance, in two hundred schools across the US and London — youth-guidance.org.
Boys To Men Mentoring Network in California and beyond — boystomen.org.
Journeymen Triangle in North Carolina and Journeymen Institute on Vashon Island, Washington — journeymen.us and journeymentriangle.org.
Rite of Passage Journeys for boys in the Pacific Northwest — riteofpassagejourneys.org.
The Brotherhood Program at Community Change Inc — communitychangeinc.com.
Coaching Boys Into Men, which trains athletic coaches in dating violence prevention — search for it locally.
Support the older men’s work.
ManKind Project — mankindproject.org.
Sacred Sons — sacredsons.com.
Evryman — evryman.com.
Send the man in your life. Donate. Talk about these programmes openly.
If you are a father, do your own work. Find a men’s circle. Find a therapist. Find an elder. Sit with your father wound. You cannot father a boy from inside a wound you have not addressed. Start where you are. The work is available.
If you are an older man, come back into the room. Your generation is sitting on the lineage. The boys cannot find it without you. Mentor one boy this year. Just one. The boy down the street whose father is not present. The nephew. The son of your colleague. The boy in your congregation. Reach him. Be reachable.
Watch what your sons are watching. Not as surveillance, as company. Sit with them. Ask them what they are seeing. Do not lecture. Ask. Listen. Then offer them something else. The Brian Cox documentary instead of the Tate clip. The Wim Hof breath work instead of the Liver King supplement scam. The boys are looking for something to be inside. Give them better things.
Refuse the framing that men cannot be reached. Refuse the language that turns all men into monsters. Refuse to write off the boys, even the ones who have hurt people, even the ones in the militia, even the ones who have already gone deep. The Congo boys came back. The redpillers in the studies are showing up on the deradicalisation forums having woken up. The men in the men’s circles are doing the work. The boys can come home. Hold that as fact, in your body, against every story that says they cannot.
What I believe
Here is what I believe in my deepest heart.
The boy is in every man we are afraid of. He is also in every man we love.
The crushing of the universal boy is the deepest wound this culture is carrying, and it is the wound from which most of the other visible wounds flow. The website. The legislation. The masculinity podcasts. The militia. The ICE recruitment. The boys who shoot the women they were told they were entitled to. All of it is what happens when the universal boy is crushed before he can become the noble man.
But the boy can be reached. The Congo proved it to me. The men who write to me every week prove it to me. The fifteen thousand boys who have come through Boys To Men prove it. The two hundred schools running BAM prove it. The fathers re-fathering themselves in their men’s circles prove it. The older men who have come out of seclusion prove it.
The current dying sick system is not destiny. It is an architecture. It can be built differently. It is being built differently, in pockets, in small rooms, in circles around fires, in school basements at lunchtime, in retreat centres in the mountains, in drumming circles in Bukavu.
We have to scale this work. We have to fund it. We have to talk about it. We have to send our boys to it and our men into the work that supports it. We have to refuse to let the manosphere and ICE and the Discord servers be the only forces moving on the boys.
The noble masculine is not dead. He is sitting at the edge of the circle. He is drumming for the women he has hurt, and he is also drumming for the boys who will come after him, the ones who do not yet know the rhythm but will learn it because someone is holding it for them.
If this piece moved something in you, send it to a mother of sons. Send it to a father. Send it to a man you know who has been doing the work quietly for years and deserves to know that what he is doing matters. The boys are waiting to be reached.
We can do this, my loves.
The boys can come home.
But only if we go and get them.
In love and devotion
Elayne Kalila
My heart hurt so deeply when I read this. Thank you for the time and devotion it took to write this.
Thank you for this. I agree, and, I work with men after they come out of prison. What I learned is that there also has to be consequences. We need that, and so do they. Consequences are teachers too. The men I work with who want to change are the ones that became more noble and often work to support that in other men. The consequences may very well have initiated them. If what you prescribe can work, the younger we start, the better. And I will say, there are some people who should never be free again. The ones who refuse to change. The ones that are malignant narcissist psychopaths which have caused mass harm. The old village would have ostracized them.
Yes, that boy is inside them too, and consequences can be compassionate, but they also need to restrict those men from doing anymore harm. Some people will not learn in this lifetime. Trump will not learn in this lifetime and we all need justice to open the way to justice again! The mother has her rage too. Kali-ma has a purpose and death is not the end of us.