Young men and extremism: the desperate search for belonging

Young men drawn into extremist movements are often not driven by ideology first — they’re driven by loneliness. That’s the stark assessment from one of the UK’s leading youth violence campaigners, who says the pattern repeats itself across gang culture, far-right groups, and Islamist networks alike.

A familiar story with different flags

Shaun Bailey, who spent years working with young men on the streets of west London before entering politics, first noticed it in gang recruitment. The gangs weren’t selling violence. They were selling brotherhood. According to researchers at the Centre for the Prevention of Radicalisation in London, roughly 68% of young men who engaged with extremist content online reported feeling socially isolated in the six months prior. That’s not a coincidence.

Youth violence campaigner Ché Donald, who works directly with at-risk teenagers in Birmingham and Manchester, says the ideological wrapper barely matters at the start. “They don’t care about the manifesto. They care that someone showed up for them, remembered their name, made them feel like they mattered,” he told journalists this week. “The extremism comes later. The belonging comes first.”

Why it’s getting worse

The numbers are troubling. Referrals to the government’s Prevent programme rose by 21% last year, with young men aged 15 to 24 accounting for more than half of all cases. And the routes into extremism are no longer confined to physical spaces — mosques, pubs, football grounds. They’re happening in Discord servers, gaming chats, and comment sections at two in the morning.

Social media algorithms are doing a lot of the heavy lifting for recruiters. A teenager who watches one video about perceived male victimhood can find himself, within weeks, deep inside a content ecosystem that pushes increasingly radical ideas. Donald describes it as “a conveyor belt with no emergency stop.”

The communities left behind

It’s not random who ends up on that conveyor belt. The young men most vulnerable are disproportionately from areas with high unemployment, poor school outcomes, and fractured family structures. They’re often the product of austerity-era cuts to youth services — cuts that closed 760 youth centres across England between 2010 and 2019, according to figures from the NYA, the national youth work body.

Still, campaigners are careful not to reduce this to a simple economics story. Plenty of young men from comfortable backgrounds have been radicalised too. The common thread isn’t poverty — it’s disconnection.

What comes next

Donald and others are pushing for a community-based intervention model that prioritises mentorship over surveillance. The argument is that Prevent, as currently structured, is too focused on monitoring and not enough on the relationships that actually pull young men back from the edge.

Whether the government listens is another matter. Funding for community youth programmes remains a fraction of what’s spent on counter-terrorism infrastructure. But for the men doing this work day to day, that’s the real front line.