Patrick Cooper’s letter “Any wonder some young white males rebel?” cannot be dismissed as “a fat load of delusional fear-based crap” as one commenter would have us believe.
It seems to me that there is confusion between what boys and young men actually are, and how they are being presented by some media. And while I’m sure that Lara is correct in her view that young men in New Zealand are overwhelmingly kind and decent, there is overseas evidence that young men in general are being grossly maligned.
To give just one example, in March 2021, in a school assembly at Brauer College in Victoria, Australia, the boys were instructed to stand up and apologise to girls and women for the violence perpetrated by others of their sex. They were told to apologise to girls next to them, many of whom they didn’t even know.
Parents were outraged by this tarring of boys in general with the behaviour of a minority. In response to the parental uproar, Principal Jane Boyle later apologised, accepting that such a proxy apology had been “inappropriate”. But while this “symbolic gesture of apology” is a sensational case and cannot be said to represent the norm, the fact remains that it could not have occurred had the principal not felt the wider social environment justified it.
Martin Hanson, Nelson
