Helen Rumbelow
Thursday April 09 2026, 8.00pm BST, The Times
Finbar Sullivan died from a stabbing in a north London park this week and tributes were immediately given for the 21-year-old, who was a gentle, artistic soul, dearly beloved. Chris Sullivan, his father, an artist, was heartbroken, describing his son as “very moral, he always stood up for other people”. A family friend, Ellen Kinnally, described him as having “an angelic quality”.
We can’t know the details of this horrible violence, as the police investigation continues. It seems Sullivan went from his family home at their flat in Maida Vale to Primrose Hill with a friend, an innocent outing to enjoy the nice weather and take some pictures.
But the news of his death made my heart clench for the vulnerability of boys and young men. We as a society are focused on men as the main perpetrators of crime, especially violent crime. That they are also the main victims of violent crime is rarely held to the light.
I think this may be important. Boys grow up knowing that when they are men they may be considered a physical threat, conditioned to that idea throughout childhood by the pairing of violence and hyper-masculinity, such as in action movies. Yet what is not shown, not considered, is that their first taste of this violence is more often as victims, and as children.
What this often looks like for the average schoolboy in a major city or town is a “mugging” for their phones or branded goods from slightly older peers, with the threat of violence from fists or knives, either real or implied. These boys get “blooded” by older boys with a “what you got for me?” cornering on the top deck of the bus, or blocking the gate to the football Astroturf, or lurking around the edges of parks or railway stations. My son, 17, has been mugged multiple times, as have all his friends.
They know it is not something they are expected to talk about or get sympathy for. One mother said her 15-year-old has stopped mentioning it, preferring evasion tactics such as a “decoy” phone, taking electric bikes home instead of the bus, or abandoning parks entirely if alone or in male groups.
A study for parliament’s all-party group on victims and witnesses of crime found that just 3 in 20 violent crimes against children aged 10-18 are reported to police, one of the lowest rates of all groups. It was only as a result of my son getting mugged that my brother and my partner broke the silence on how it happened to them as teenage boys.
While women are almost equally likely to get their phone pickpocketed, the forceful mugging, known as “street robbery”, is disproportionately targeted at men, and particularly at boys. The government’s report Women and the Criminal Justice System shows that three times as many men as women are the victims of robbery.
A report from the Metropolitan Police in 2025 stated that “knife-enabled crime” mostly consisted of this kind of street robbery. Most of the victims of knife-enabled crime were male, at 78 per cent, and mostly young: a quarter were under 18. When the robbery escalates to actual injury the victim is even more likely to be male.
London is not an unsafe hellscape of the type caricatured by those on the American right: both knife crime and robbery are on the decline in the capital, and it remains one of the safest cities in the western world. But if you talk to teenage boys, they don’t feel any safer.
For any boy who has the freedom of one of Britain’s towns or cities, it means those first steps towards independence at secondary school, with a soft boy’s neck loose in an outsize blazer, are also about the experience of becoming prey.
The police speculate that boys are more at risk because they spend more time outdoors, at Astroturfs and skate parks, and that may be true but it is not the whole story: male muggers select male victims. My daughter has been in mixed groups where the muggers threaten and steal only from the boys. In the gendered world view of the criminal male, there is shame in robbing a girl, while boys are “fair game”. I can be safe in a park prowled by muggers in a way my son would not be.
Understanding that you are a target for male violence is threaded through the experience of growing up as a male.
Yet we as a society are remarkably quiet about it: the emotional suppression we expect of teenage boys is more convenient and less trouble for us. Why don’t schools put on workshops about how to cope as the victim of this kind of crime: how to keep safe, where to go for support, that it is understandably, if not necessarily, human to be shaken and scared? Is there a connection between the unsupported vulnerability of boys in their early teens and the appeal to that age group of “strongman” manosphere influencers such as Andrew Tate?
I recently interviewed Ruth Whippman, the author of BoyMom, about masculinity and young boys. She said society was uncomfortable with the idea of male victimhood and deeply resistant to recognising male vulnerability. As babies, males are “under-cared for”, Whippman found in the research literature on infant care — comforted and cuddled less. This extends into adolescence, Whippman wrote, with an impossible rush for them to grow out of vulnerability.
“Even though boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be the victim of a violent crime, parents tend to be more protective of girls,” Whippman wrote. “Refusing to see boys as vulnerable reinforces gender stereotypes and puts pressure on boys to grow up more quickly.”
There may be another way of doing this.
Link (Archive)
Thursday April 09 2026, 8.00pm BST, The Times
Finbar Sullivan died from a stabbing in a north London park this week and tributes were immediately given for the 21-year-old, who was a gentle, artistic soul, dearly beloved. Chris Sullivan, his father, an artist, was heartbroken, describing his son as “very moral, he always stood up for other people”. A family friend, Ellen Kinnally, described him as having “an angelic quality”.
We can’t know the details of this horrible violence, as the police investigation continues. It seems Sullivan went from his family home at their flat in Maida Vale to Primrose Hill with a friend, an innocent outing to enjoy the nice weather and take some pictures.
But the news of his death made my heart clench for the vulnerability of boys and young men. We as a society are focused on men as the main perpetrators of crime, especially violent crime. That they are also the main victims of violent crime is rarely held to the light.
I think this may be important. Boys grow up knowing that when they are men they may be considered a physical threat, conditioned to that idea throughout childhood by the pairing of violence and hyper-masculinity, such as in action movies. Yet what is not shown, not considered, is that their first taste of this violence is more often as victims, and as children.
What this often looks like for the average schoolboy in a major city or town is a “mugging” for their phones or branded goods from slightly older peers, with the threat of violence from fists or knives, either real or implied. These boys get “blooded” by older boys with a “what you got for me?” cornering on the top deck of the bus, or blocking the gate to the football Astroturf, or lurking around the edges of parks or railway stations. My son, 17, has been mugged multiple times, as have all his friends.
They know it is not something they are expected to talk about or get sympathy for. One mother said her 15-year-old has stopped mentioning it, preferring evasion tactics such as a “decoy” phone, taking electric bikes home instead of the bus, or abandoning parks entirely if alone or in male groups.
A study for parliament’s all-party group on victims and witnesses of crime found that just 3 in 20 violent crimes against children aged 10-18 are reported to police, one of the lowest rates of all groups. It was only as a result of my son getting mugged that my brother and my partner broke the silence on how it happened to them as teenage boys.
While women are almost equally likely to get their phone pickpocketed, the forceful mugging, known as “street robbery”, is disproportionately targeted at men, and particularly at boys. The government’s report Women and the Criminal Justice System shows that three times as many men as women are the victims of robbery.
A report from the Metropolitan Police in 2025 stated that “knife-enabled crime” mostly consisted of this kind of street robbery. Most of the victims of knife-enabled crime were male, at 78 per cent, and mostly young: a quarter were under 18. When the robbery escalates to actual injury the victim is even more likely to be male.
London is not an unsafe hellscape of the type caricatured by those on the American right: both knife crime and robbery are on the decline in the capital, and it remains one of the safest cities in the western world. But if you talk to teenage boys, they don’t feel any safer.
For any boy who has the freedom of one of Britain’s towns or cities, it means those first steps towards independence at secondary school, with a soft boy’s neck loose in an outsize blazer, are also about the experience of becoming prey.
The police speculate that boys are more at risk because they spend more time outdoors, at Astroturfs and skate parks, and that may be true but it is not the whole story: male muggers select male victims. My daughter has been in mixed groups where the muggers threaten and steal only from the boys. In the gendered world view of the criminal male, there is shame in robbing a girl, while boys are “fair game”. I can be safe in a park prowled by muggers in a way my son would not be.
Understanding that you are a target for male violence is threaded through the experience of growing up as a male.
Yet we as a society are remarkably quiet about it: the emotional suppression we expect of teenage boys is more convenient and less trouble for us. Why don’t schools put on workshops about how to cope as the victim of this kind of crime: how to keep safe, where to go for support, that it is understandably, if not necessarily, human to be shaken and scared? Is there a connection between the unsupported vulnerability of boys in their early teens and the appeal to that age group of “strongman” manosphere influencers such as Andrew Tate?
I recently interviewed Ruth Whippman, the author of BoyMom, about masculinity and young boys. She said society was uncomfortable with the idea of male victimhood and deeply resistant to recognising male vulnerability. As babies, males are “under-cared for”, Whippman found in the research literature on infant care — comforted and cuddled less. This extends into adolescence, Whippman wrote, with an impossible rush for them to grow out of vulnerability.
“Even though boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be the victim of a violent crime, parents tend to be more protective of girls,” Whippman wrote. “Refusing to see boys as vulnerable reinforces gender stereotypes and puts pressure on boys to grow up more quickly.”
There may be another way of doing this.
Link (Archive)
