What will boys be?

Dr Belle Tindall recognises that our society is desperate to work out why there has been such a rise in male violence and toxic masculinity – and says the Bible has the answers

I woke up on Monday to a slogan stamped upon my city: plastered on posters and billboards, buildings and bus stops, are the words “boys will be…what we teach them to be”. 

This, of course, is a city-wide rebuttal to the notion that ‘boys will be boys’, right? A term that we have so commonly used to imply that there’s a kind of inevitability to their behaviour. I think I’m right in observing that this term has mostly been used in a soft and whimsical kind of manner – when boys leave dirty mugs in their room, when they kick a football through a window, when they wriggle out of their mum’s hug…insert harmless stereotype of your choice here…