It’s 10am on a Thursday, and young people are already eagerly waiting outside the front door of an old Victorian fire station in central Hull. Inside is the Warren youth project, which has been supporting young people in the East Yorkshire port city for more than four decades. In recent years, though, it’s faced a new and growing challenge.
“We’ve always had the far right,” youthworker JJ Tatten tells openDemocracy. “But in the past six to seven years, we have seen a significant rise in far-right organisations being more targeted in the demographics they’re trying to reach.” One demographic is particularly vulnerable to these groups’ grooming efforts, he says: teenage boys.
From the influence of toxic ‘manosphere’ influencers such as Andrew Tate, who tells followers that women should “bear responsibility” for sexual assault, to the rise of far-right groups including Students Against Tyranny, and the increasing attempts by Reform UK to woo Gen Z male voters, concerns about the far-right radicalisation of young men in the UK are growing.
