‘Mentoring is what young men crave without realising it’

Being a man means being responsible, respecting other people, making a contribution to the community … and …” Dave, 28, hesitates for a couple of seconds and looks down at the little girl smiling broadly beside him: “Most of all, it means being a good father,” he says. The girl is his daughter Susie, nine. She’s tugging at my sleeve excitedly. “Excuse me, can I say something?” she says. “I just want to say I’m proud of my dad. I’m really proud he’s my dad.”

The most important role anyone can take on is to be a parent. Poor parenting can have devastating consequences, especially in relation to fathers and sons. Dave admits he didn’t always feel able to be a good father to Susie. “I had a major trauma that I’d rather not talk about when I was little,” he explains, “but it affected my whole life, shaped my whole life with depression, anger and violence. It turned me against everyone, even against myself.”

Today is graduation day for a new cohort of mentees in the community hut in the heart of the sprawling Whitehawk council estate in Brighton, once considered one of the most deprived areas in the country. The hut is the home of A Band of Brothers and Dave is here for the celebration with his daughter, his partner and his mother, Kate.

Since it was founded five years ago, A Band of Brothers has helped to transform the lives of more than 50 young men in Brighton and the surrounding areas. Recording an 80% reduction in reoffending among participants with previous criminal convictions, the success rate is remarkable – and, so far, 75% of men who began the programme without a job have subsequently found work. Currently it has more than 100 mentors at its disposal and more than 100 on the waiting list – all are volunteers from the local community, and range from professionals, tradesmen, business owners, actors and life coaches. Many are fathers.

Nathan Roberts, who co-founded the charity along with a psychotherapist and a leadership development consultant specialising in drama, explains its aims. “The work we are doing here is first of all about how we identify the key things that have wounded us in life. To get there, it takes a lot of patience and trust. That’s what our mentors provide. Our job is to teach by example, by actions – not just to tell, but to encourage, to explain and to stand side by side with the young men we are guiding into manhood.

“I believe that for all of us as human beings, the most powerful of what we learn is what we see modelled. Whatever we are seeing as we grow up constructs our world view and is a major decider in how we embrace our own way of being. How can I act in a way and be in a way that is socially most appropriate if I have never seen it modelled? Positive role models are crucial.” Roberts has been involved in men’s work since 2002 and, over the past 14 years, has worked with youth charities such as Youth at Risk, Raleigh International and the Tutu Foundation. He explains his motivation: “As a boy, I struggled to find my own role models and felt quite disconnected from older men. I still feel the pain of my troubled teenage years.”

By now the hut is crowded with mentors, mentees, family members and several probation officers. For a room packed with upwards of 50 men the atmosphere is curiously calm. When everyone is seated, a short film about A Band of Brothers is screened. As I watch it and listen to the young men giving their testimony, I’m taken back to my own dysfunctional adolescence. Much of what I hear resonates on so many levels. I find myself thinking about my relationship with my own father, who could be incredibly charming but mostly I remember him as a selfish, violent drunk. Despite his failings I loved him more than I hated him and by the time I was 18 I was just like him – occasionally charming, but mostly a selfish, violent drunk. I thought that was how to be a man, to be like my father. But sometimes I wondered, as the years passed and my social deterioration and harm-causing intensified, if my father had been a better role model would I have been a better man? When the lights go up I’m struggling to hide my tears.

I know from my own failed family experience that the journey of change from boy to man can be a hard road. As a teenage prisoner I was one of many boys with distorted ideas of what it is to be a man; so many of us ended up in a vicious cycle of delinquency and criminality and an almost inevitable long-term entanglement with prison and probation services.

The statistics are telling. Men account for eight out of 10 people cautioned by the police, and nearly nine out of 10 people found guilty of indictable offences. Men are responsible for 97% of burglary and 92% of violence against the person. Two thirds of all male offenders are in their 20s: the majority of the 85,000 prison population of England and Wales are men under the age of 30. Despair, too, is prevalent – the second most common cause of death among men under 35 is suicide. Clearly, something is going badly wrong. Is it family background that is pushing so many of our young men over the edge?

Chatting with a group of graduate mentees later is as uplifting as it is moving. Colin is 19 and tells me that now he’s been through the programme he wants to be a mentor. “Not everyone gets an opportunity like this to change,” he says. “I was never a man of my word, I breached curfew orders and went to prison. I saw a poster for this when I was in a hostel. It said they climbed mountains and I really needed to climb a mountain. My father died when I was 14, then my grandad died. I started to fight against the world, thieving out of shops, I felt like everyone was against me. I found it hard to speak to anyone and I would hide my emotions from people who knew me. But now it’s different. Day in and day out I would trust any of the older guys here with my life.”

Kieron is 22 and has also been to prison. “This has shown me how to live a proper life,” he says. “And it’s not just the mentors who help us – we help each other.” Colin agrees: “The number of people I’ve seen here helping one another is amazing. I got my mate Reece to come along, then Preston and Craig. None of us here are the same – we’re a band of brothers, but we’ve got our own unique problems. We work it out and find our own answers together.”

When I speak to some of the mentors later there is a parallel enthusiasm. One man, a former new age traveller and single father, tells me he has gained as much from being a mentor as any of the young men that he has worked with may have. “I needed a way of making a difference,” he says. “I have a troubled history. I wanted to be able to put that to some good use. This work lets me do that.”

Another man, an Oxford University graduate who went to prison for drug offences and now runs his own business, nods. “I had a good upbringing,” he says. “My dad was working class made good, but he was a figure of fear. I had a bit of a mid-life crisis and it took me a while to get my shit together. Here everything is welcome – anger, despair, tears and hope. You don’t have to be funny, high achieving, entertaining. And beyond the fact that we know we are doing good work with the young men, we get a tremendous amount of satisfaction out of doing it.”

A third man, an actor with three daughters, says he saw from his own experience that sometimes it could be hard to know what exactly it means to be a man, to be a father: “I was harbouring wounds I’d suffered in childhood. My stepfather taught me how not to be a man. I had a lot of respect for my dad but for a lot of the time he wasn’t present.”

His parents separated when he was 11. “We create a sense of village, a sense of community – belonging. Tribal traditions involve young men being taken out of their usual lives and being taught by elders how to be an adult. So we are doing the same kind of thing in a safe environment. It’s very important that when men are going through that emotional stuff they don’t do it in isolation.”

He goes on: “So many young men get their modelling from the television, from gaming or from their associates who may also be struggling to find an authentic way to make the transition from adolescence to manhood. I think a lot of gang culture comes from young men looking to each other to be mentored. But it should be elders, which is where we come in.”

Initiation takes place on weekend outings, in forests, on mountains – known as the Quest. The young men must pledge to keep their word, not to take criticism personally, to make no assumptions and always to do their honourable best. The exercises are physically and emotionally challenging as personal narratives are rewritten using dramatic processes and forthright group discussions in wild, natural surroundings. Once initiated, the mentors are there whenever needed and run weekly support sessions in the community hut for a minimum of three months. I ask the actor what keeps the young men motivated.

“Mentoring is what young men crave without realising it,” he says. “Often they are longing for someone who can show them the way. They need to be shown the difference between being aggressive and being assertive and given the space to develop the confidence to communicate in the correct way. They need to be guided so they are able to be empathic, compassionate and at ease with what people traditionally describe as our more feminine side – they soon understand that being comfortable with vulnerability is the ultimate strength. We stand together.”

Currently funded by Sussex probation service and Sussex police, Nathan Roberts tells me that one day they hope to be able to operate from their own purpose-built rites of passage facility. Ironically, however, under the government’s transforming rehabilitation strategy, funding from probation may well come to an end before next year’s privatisation of the service.

“This is working,” says Roberts. “We are teaching our young men that self-respect is most important. They are discovering what it means to be an adult man – a man who takes responsibility, who holds himself accountable, who owns when he makes mistakes.”

Finally, the new graduates stand up to share their journey with the audience. “This has changed my life,” is a phrase much repeated. The room is filled with a collective sense of optimism, joy even. Then Dave’s mother, Kate, gets up to speak. She is nervous, but determined to have her say and the room falls silent. She glances at her son and then pans the seated rows of faces. Her eyes are glistening. “Can I just say to you all, to all you Band of Brothers, can I just say thank you. I trust him again. Thank you so much – you have given me back my son.”

abandofbrothers.org.uk

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/28/mentoring-is-what-young-men-crave-band-of-brothers?CMP=ema_632