How do young men prove that they are man enough? What do they have to do in the eyes of their mates to prove their masculinities? Across class, ethnic, racial and religious backgrounds there is still a significant transition that boys have to navigate in becoming young men and somehow proving their male identities. Though there have been significant shifts, masculinities are seldom directly addressed in, say, schooling. It is still generally assumed that boys will be boys and that you can do relatively little to change them.
But often this means that boys are left to carry their own fears and anxieties, unable to reach out to others for support. They learn that emotions are deemed feminine, and so a sign of weakness. It is a terrible cultural reality that a significant proportion of young men prefer to kill themselves than face the embarrassment of reaching out to others.
Other young men seize on religious convictions, however distorted a version of Islam those convictions represent, and some get themselves into a position where they believe that it is only by killing others that they can prove themselves.
The front page of the London Evening Standard on Tuesday 23 May 2017 carried a headline ‘Slaughter of Ariana Innocents’ as it announced that "many children among 22 killed and 59 hurt in suicide bombing at pop concert." The attacker, they said, was "known to security services." Police had been called to reports of an explosion at the 21,000-capacity arena at 10.33, moments after Ariana Grande had finished her concert.
What sort of man would do this?
What was immediately striking in Manchester was how young the suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was at only 22. What was striking about Khalid Masood, who was responsible for the attack on Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament in March, was that he was 52—much older than we might expect. He was much older than, for instance, the young men involved in the London bombings, who I traced in my book Urban Fears and Global Terrors: Citizenship, Multiculture and Belongings after 7/7. He did not fit the expected profile—although he did fit the idea that it is mainly men who carry out these horrendous acts of terror.These differing profiles remind us that there is something faulty in the social science methodology that encourages us to think that there has to be single “profile”, that we can discover if only we reflect enough on the details of the young men who commit such violent atrocities. Often, we are looking for causal explanations when we should be exploring the different narratives in the lives of these young men. That takes much more consideration of their relationships, as men, to cultural masculinities—including Islamic masculinities.
When we ask how a young man could commit such an atrocity against innocent young children, we also need to engage with an Islamist creed that holds pop concerts as symbols of Western degeneration—especially where they seem to encourage the sexualisation of young women. It is as if the young children do not exist in their own joy and happiness, but only as symbols of a degenerate culture that needs to be punished. But we also have to think about how young men learn to relate to their bodies and sexualities, and what responsibilities schools have to young men who are increasingly growing up in a culture which leaves them with instrumental and devalued relationships with women.
Salman Abedi's story
Abedi was the child of Libyan refugees who moved to the UK to flee Gaddafi’s regime. He was the second child: he had an older brother, Ismail, and a younger brother and sister. His father Ramadan Abedi, also known as Abu Ismael, attended the Didsbury Mosque where he sometimes made the communal call to prayer. He is understood to have moved back to Libya several years ago, leaving his older two sons in Manchester, though they used to travel to Libya to be with the family.A man who lives locally, and knew Abedi as a neighbour, said he was friendly. He said he was a cyclist who was known in the area, and that they used to talk quite a bit—although not about extremism. Others recalled an abrasive, tall, skinny young man who was little known in the neighbourhood, and often seen in traditional Islamic clothing. Some neighbours reported that Abedi could quickly become angry about relatively small issues, like where cars were parked or the collection of bins.
Fawzi Haffer, who attended the same mosque as the family, insists that the mosque "has always been known as a very moderate mosque. We have many Libyans here but the sermons are extremely moderate, we are very liberal…the preaching and the way we teach Islam is the correct Islam, in our opinion. We have no ‘hardcores’ as far as I know. We always make sure we are very mainstream."
Some do recall, however, that during one anti-extremist sermon decrying Islamic State, Salman was hostile to the preacher, staring at him angrily. Reports suggest he was subsequently banned from the mosque.
In an interview for the World at One, a former schoolmate, who did not want to be named, said that Salman found it difficult to make an adjustment to school, that he was often withdrawn and that teachers would leave him alone because they could not expect a response from him. He was not bright and would be bullied by others in the class, but would not respond.
The impact of migration, and the difficulties of young men finding themselves in a very different cultural space—including potentially being made to feel that, if they are bullied and seem to be rejected by others in their class, there must be something wrong with them—can be difficult to evaluate.
This bullying, and the feeling of being “other”, has been a feature in other narratives of young men who have gone on to identify with IS. As Martha Karney pointed out in the World at One interview, not every boy with this kind of displaced second-generation migration experience who is bullied after a difficult childhood takes such a path—but this is not really the point. In fact, it again shows the form of causal explanation that many assume researchers must be searching for.
It might well be that, as a childhood friend of Ismail, who also asked not to be named, told the Press Association: “Ismail’s brother was kind of like a normal guy.... He was always friendly, nothing to suggest [that he was violent], to be honest.” That friend also remembered Salman’s father, saying, “I see him sometimes raising the azan, or call to prayer, but that was a long time ago. As far as I know he went back to Libya when things were much better over there, to work over there.”
Migrations, masculinity and proving yourself
One can imagine how, having been left with an older brother, in a different country from your parents, it could be difficult to know where you belong. This could even, potentially, make you susceptible to radicalisation. On a number of occasions, Salman is reported as saying that he felt there was “nothing wrong with suicide bombing.” A couple of times, he was reported to the police by fellow students at college concerned about his behaviour. His parents seem also to have been concerned with him dropping out of Salford University, where he was doing a business and management course. There might have been added pressures to prove his value, especially in the eyes of his father.This is what martyrdom offers: a proof of your value—if not in the eyes of your family or former schoolmates, then in the eyes of a higher divine authority. This has a particular appeal to young men who might otherwise feel lost with an uneasy sense of belonging. The young men involved in the London bombings used to gather in a gym because, not speaking Arabic and from Pakistani backgrounds, they often felt estranged from the language of the mosque.
Calling them "losers"
Following the Manchester bombing, Donald Trump announced that henceforth he would be referring to terrorists as “losers”. “I won’t call them monsters,” Trump said, “Because they would like that term, they would think that’s a great name; I will call them, from now on, losers because that’s what they are, they’re losers. And we’ll have more of them but they’re losers – just remember that.”For this, he gained support—beyond his usual support in the right-wing media—with the Atlantic saying the categorization “could be a savvy strategy”.
Yet as Jennifer Sclafani, who teaches linguistics at Georgetown University, warned, it could also have “the effect of diminishing the seriousness of the events that transpired. People with this reaction may understand the word ‘loser’ as someone who is impotent or incapable of causing real harm. For people who interpret it this way, his speech is likely to be seen as insensitive and offensive to all those who have been deeply affected by the tragedy.”
George Lakoff also recognised that Trump’s obsession with losers was a symptom of his obsession with a masculinity that divides the world and people into winners and losers. He wrote that, “The idea is that terrorism is supposed to make you feel afraid. And the idea is to calm people down. So for Obama, that means be cool. Go about your business; the way to defeat terrorism is to show it doesn’t work. The Trump logic is different. It’s ‘show that they are not going to win. Show that they are losers and they’re going to lose.”
What this misses is the taken-for-granted hyper-masculinity that Trump so often assumes, and the ways that this assault on the young men’s masculinities could even encourage young jihadi militants into further actions. We might have questions about both strategies, but if we take into considerations issues around masculinity, we can see that Trump’s strategy could be provocative and touch the very nerves that could encourage young men to prove that they are not losers.
Tom Sanderson, director of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, noted that that Trump’s strategy is “ostensibly more aggressive”. He also notes that, “Rhetoric is important. And calling people who murder young girls ‘losers’ is stupid. Calling them 'killers, murderers and terrorists' is more accurate.” He insists,“The term loser is not going to resonate. So I don’t know why he made such an effort to announce a new name for terrorists. There’s no value to it.”
It seems that one’s late teens and early twenties are a particularly vulnerable time for young men, especially those who are finding themselves in an adult world without the support of school friends; sometimes separated from family, and having to somehow make it on their own. Often, they do not appreciate the needs they have for support, for they have learnt from a young age that emotional needs are a sign of weakness and a threat to a male identity that is defined as being independent and self-sufficient. Engaging with issues around men and masculinities should not be separated out from matters of religion and cultural identity—the two must be considered together, especially in ways they are approached at school.
Unless we seriously consider the situation and needs of young men, already insecure in their male identities being unable to live up to traditional breadwinner masculinities, it could make the global threats we face even worse.
