JCIP #364 - Dr Sophie King-Hill

In episode 364 of The Just Checking In Podcast we checked in with Dr Sophie King-Hill.

Sophie is currently Associate Professor at the Health Services Management Centre at the University of Birmingham and has worked in academia since 2013. 

She published her latest book, ‘Reframing Masculinity for Young Men and Boys’ in 2025, and her areas of academic expertise are in masculinity and young men and boys, and children and young people and sexual behaviours. 

In this episode we discuss her academic journey, her working-class background and how that’s shaped her work and the issues she writes about. We also discuss her TedX talk in 2022 entitled ‘Stop Talking about the Weather and Start Talking about Sex’ and her pride in that achievement.

We also talk about something Sophie calls ‘precarious masculinity’, the impact of pornography on men and boys, both positive and negative, something Sophie calls ‘the porn paradox’ and the role of consent for men and boys. 

For Sophie’s mental health journey, we discuss her social class through a mental health lens and motherhood.

As always, #itsokaytovent

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Hi Venters, welcome back to another episode of the Just Checking In Podcast. I'm your host, Freddie Cocker, and this podcast is brought to you by Vent, a place where everyone, but especially men and boys, can open up about their mental health issues, break down stigmas, and start conversations. In each episode, I check in with a special guest. We have a natter and a chat about all things mental health, as well as anything and everything else they are passionate about. If it helps that person with their mental health, we discuss it. My special guest for this episode is academic and author Dr. Sophie King Hill. Sophie is currently associate professor at the Health Services Management Centre at the University of Birmingham and has worked in academia since 2013. She published her latest book, Reframing Masculinity for Young Men and Boys, in 2025, which is how I came across Sophie in the first place, and her areas of academic expertise reside in masculinity and young men and boys, and children, young people, and sexual behaviors. In this episode, we discuss her academic journey, her working class background and how that shaped her work and the issues she writes about, her TEDx talk in 2022 entitled Stop Talking About the Weather and Start Talking About Sex, and her pride in that achievement. We also talk about something Sophie calls precarious masculinity. We talk about the impact of pornography on men and boys, both positive and negative, and what she calls the porn paradox, as well as the role of consent for men and boys through a nuanced lens. For Sophie's mental health journey, we discuss her social class through a mental health lens as she comes from a working class background, and very briefly a discussion about motherhood. So this is how my conversation with Dr. Sophie King Hill went. Sophie, welcome to the Just Checking In Pod. Thank you so much for letting me check in with you. It took a long time to get this date in the diary, but I'm a persistent man, if nothing else. You are a very busy woman, academic, super mum. How are you on this Saturday morning?

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Oh, I'm good. I'm good. Um thank you for your patience with everything. I think it's a combination of factors. I think I've got a new role within the universities where I'm working with the Cabinet Office on the Safest Streets mission.

SPEAKER_03 2:32

Congrats on that.

SPEAKER_02 2:33

Yeah, I'm really pleased. So that's crossed over, but I think really it's not me, it's the topic. I think it's a really hot topic at the moment. People are realizing it's so important to talk about. So yeah, I'm uh I'm quite busy.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Like my good friend Dr. Emily Setti, who I found out through this process, you are already connected with. Absolutely love Em. You are women who genuinely care about men and boys. You are fighting the good fight in the right way for them. So thank you for all the work that you're doing, first of all. And without further delay, are you ready to start the show and talk all about your wonderful journey?

SPEAKER_03 3:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

I want to start your podcast, Sophie, by talking about your academic journey. And there's so much to discuss. You didn't take a traditional route as you entered academia for the first time as a mature student, age 26, when you completed your BA undergraduate degree in education studies at Worcester University. You then completed a master's degree in education from the University of Birmingham. So, what drew you into academia at that stage? Because from speaking to your fair, you worked in teaching, youth services for your whole career up to that point.

SPEAKER_02 3:37

Yeah, I think there's that there are a number of factors that drew me to academia. I think it was never really a path that I was set to go on when I was 18. Just coming from a working class background where going to university wasn't the norm, but I was always academic, even as a child. I was really kind of predisposed to academia and books. And then, yeah, so I worked quite heavily in the youth sector. But when I I was 26 and I had my first child, you know, I remember thinking I need to do more, and I think I can make more of a difference for young people if I start to study and if I can really understand all of the different issues from an academic point of view that I was encountering in my work with young people. So yeah, it wasn't really the conventional route. So I completed my BA honours top-up in education studies at Worcester, as you said. I then went to work for Worcester as a lecturer, and then I did a distance master's with the University of Birmingham when I'd had my second child, and then I went on to do my PhD from there. Well, and then I had a third child and then with my fourth child. So I could run in joke, I did a qualification with each baby, and then with the fourth one, I had her in the middle of my PhD, and yeah, it was quite a journey because I was working full-time as well, so it was always a bit of a juggle, but I really loved what I was doing. One of the biggest regrets at the start was that I wasn't going to be able to work with young people anymore. It was a real reluctance, but I sit with young people for most of my you know working week now. So what's happened is you know, I've I've ended up back where I was with young people, which was the thing I was worried wasn't going to happen, so I feel very, very lucky.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

Before we talk about all the work you're doing with men and boys, children and young people as well. What transferable skills did your previous career give you for academia and maybe vice versa?

SPEAKER_02 5:23

Yeah, so not being a career academic, I think you look at things very, very differently. So by career academic, I mean, you know, you you just go into academia, which is fine, and you stay there, you know, from when you do your degree. I think it showed me that, you know, we need to work more uh cross-sector, but also cross-disciplines, so with other departments to have different understandings on things, but also work with those frontline practitioners and listen to them as experts within their field. So I think coming from that, I'd already got that lens. Also, I think I'm predisposed to look for funding for research coming from the third sector, you know. I was always looking for money, and that's never left me. I mean, not money for me, money for the projects, but you know, it's that kind of different perspective. I think I feel very privileged to have worked with young people in those settings, and it's given me a kind of different view on academia and also working with obviously with students as well.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

Like you said, you do your PhD at the University of Birmingham, you then land the role of associate professor at that institution in September 2019. You've remained there ever since, working your way up, and brilliantly so. How has this work now allowed you to raise your public profile to the point where you're speaking to likes of uh little old me, obviously, but also people like Friend of the Pod Chris Hemings, who's an absolute legend.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

Yeah, I think it's quite a supportive environment within the university around things like freedom of speech, and you're really encouraged to put your work out there. You have to kind of weigh up the risks for yourself as well, because you know, it's not I'm not just talking about a kind of a mundane topic, you know, people get really emotive about this, but we've got a really excellent comms team who support us as academics if we want to put our work out there. So, yeah, I mean it gives me the platform and allows me to talk very openly about research and contentious topics, so it feels like quite a protected space to have the freedom of speech to talk about evidence-informed concepts that might be a little bit, you know, close to the bone for some.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

One of the main pillars, or two main pillars, I should say, of your work is your work on men and boys, and it's how I came across you originally. So, why did you become interested in the subject and what work have you been doing on it you can share with the listeners before we dive into a few different bits and pieces?

SPEAKER_02 7:36

Okay, so as I said, you know, I worked with children and young people over the majority of my career, especially adolescents, and you know, even when I worked with young men and boys 20 years ago, you could see how the system let them down and assume that they were just bad people, and I could I got to know these young people. Or dumb I got to know these young men as these really kind of individual human beings with values and feelings and sadness and happiness, and yet I was kind of seeing this different discourse within society, you know, that just kind of it's this blanket broad brush blame. But we know there's a violence problem with men and boys, you know, they're violent against women and children, they're violent against each other, but also violent against themselves when we look at suicide rates. So something's going on. So it really did get me thinking from an academic point of view, you know, why aren't we talking to the boys? Why are we shutting them out of the conversation? No gender is winning at the moment, so we need to kind of open the dialogue and say, why do you think this is happening? How can we help? How can we support so that everybody benefits? And I'm not saying one particular gender or another, like everyone, including young men and boys, so I think we do a huge disservice to pretty much half the population when we dismiss them right off young men and boys.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

No, very much so. And you know, men have certain advantages in society right now. Women have certain advantages, and women have certain disadvantages, and men have certain disadvantages. And I think the nuanced conversation here is really important. You may have seen it's kind of been blowing up a lot, the idea of the femisphere recently. My friend Frey Rindy has actually been writing about it for a long time and it got picked up, or shall I say, exposed more by a piece in the New Statesman. And we're seeing, well, I see a lot of the narrative. This is not amongst men particularly, but you know, you see a lot of women online who might be mothers of sons uh skinning the game in inverted commas. They're advocating more and more for their sons because they're kind of more exposed to, I guess, the discourse or the narrative that they're now seeing around young men. And then there are obviously some people who still push kind of problematic narratives, and there's this whole just back and forth conflict division. How do you think we heal the division? Because you shouldn't need to have sons to have a positive view of men, just as you shouldn't need to be the father of girls as a man to have a positive view of women, right?

SPEAKER_02 9:48

So I think we've got to be really careful around this discussion. I mean, it's it's not as binary as people who are mothers and people who aren't mothers, you know, it's a lot more complex than that. And people who aren't mothers do some really excellent work within the science as well. But I think this is more about how people are making sense of this kind of rapid culture shift around gender within society, and there's this kind of polarisation of narratives which just end up being negative or defensive, you know, so it doesn't allow for the unpacking of the complex issues, so it shuts down this important dialogue. And in terms of healing the division, we need to move away from this identity-based positioning, you know, this kind of I am a mother of boys, so I know this, or I am not a mother, so and I know this. You know, it's we need more space for empathy and understanding of individual human beings rather than you know this kind of identity-based position. We need to move away from the blame culture around men and boys. You know, I'm a huge advocate of that, and I talk about that quite extensively in my work.

SPEAKER_03 10:45

You do.

SPEAKER_02 10:46

You know, we know that women are overwhelmingly beaten, raped, murdered, and die by suicide because of men. We know that. However, having a blame culture around men and boys breaks down really important dialogue. So we need to have these really difficult conversations about why this is happening and how it's happening, and how we can support men as well. But I think we also need to make space for multiple truths. We know that this is happening, but we also know that men and boys need support in this area. Men and boys need a lot of mental health support as well. We've only got to look at the suicide rates to know that. And that, you know, especially young men, 50% of mental health issues start when they're age 15, and 75% are evident by the time they're 24. So I think we've got to realise, you know, that we're doing a huge disservice to everyone if we're discounting the voices of men and boys. And through the blame culture, it shuts down that dialogue because then if you blame someone, there's automatically a defensive position created. But also the online spaces amplify simple positions but also extreme positions. So the online spaces quite often, you know, they don't allow for the complexity of conversation that's needed. It's it's normally the loudest voices that are the most extreme and simple.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

Yeah, I always say never let the truth get in the way of a good grift. That's a term I'm sadly using quite a lot. And and building on what you said there, we talked about suicide. Something that I bang on a lot about, something that George from the Timman bangs on a lot about is that a significant percentage of male suicides come from domestic abuse. But the key is not to blame women, it's to say, right, why is this happening? Let's look at the percentages, let's have a really nuanced and balanced conversation here. Because if you don't, the men who are being victimized or they see their brothers or their sons or their friends victimized and they can't have a voice, it's just going to create a really, really toxic environment for the whole conversation. So, yeah, completely agree with you about the binary. I want to talk about your last two books, which have greatly interested me, Sophie. The first one is Harmful Sexual Behaviour and Autism, which you co-wrote with your colleagues David Russell, Stuart Allardyce, and Professor Claire Alley. I think I'm pronouncing that right.

SPEAKER_03 12:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:55

Now, as someone diagnosed with autism myself, it was very eye-opening, but quite sad to discover that, as you know, autism is overrepresented amongst those in the sexual offences population. I think it's really important for us to have a conversation about this. And unfortunately, I think the I'm using air quotes again here, autism online space is not the greatest one for sort of open and nuanced conversations right now. Ironically, probably a trait of autism in itself. Tell me why you all wanted to write the book, the statistics around this subject and the reality.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

So this was started by David Russell, he's fantastic, he's a practitioner in the field of harmful sexual behaviour. And so I knew of his work and we knew each other, the four of us, and he approached us in COVID and said, Look, I've been picking up these patterns within my work in practice with young men, and I'd like to write practice guides. So it was only meant to be a very short booklet, but the more we started talking about the issue, the more we realised we needed to unpack a lot more because you've got to be really careful when having this conversation that you don't pathologise people with autism as potential threats sexually, because that's not the case. So after a lot of discussions, it ended up being a book. So I think from our point of view, we wanted the book to recognise that this issue is often misunderstood or avoided. You know, these are both really damaging positions. But we know from practice and research, as you said, autism's overrepresented in the harmful sexual behaviour population, but the evidence base is still developing. The emphasis in the book is strong about autism, but autism not equaling harmful sexual behaviour, you know, we have to really emphasize that. But one of the things we looked at in the book, we used something called the socio-ecological model. And basically what that means is whenever there's something, an issue with an individual, we need to look at the wider structures around them, not just problematise them and say, Well, it's your fault, you're carrying out this harmful behaviour. Yes, it sits with the individual, but then we have to look at all the interpersonal relationships around them. We need to look at the kind of community relationships and what's going on in schools or in youth clubs or in any kind of perhaps religious establishments, you know, what are they being told, how are they being understood? Is the relationships and sex education fit for purpose for that young person? And then these wider societal perceptions that people tend to have of young people with special educational needs, that there's this kind of unspoken assumption that they're not allowed to have healthy sex and relationships, you know, there's this so we there's a lot in the Down syndrome conversation too.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:30

Yeah, so there's this kind of unspoken barrier around that. However, when we looked into this, we know that autistic, especially autistic young men, might be more vulnerable within this space because of things like social communication, interpretation of really complex situations, for example, consent, because they're quite abstract concepts, that kind of literal thinking that sometimes doesn't translate well across to kind of social interpretations of situations, the complexity of the online space as well. We know that a lot of young people with autism access the online spaces because of social interactions are different and suit their way of being in the world. However, they can be quite dangerous spaces as well, and you can quite quickly go down a quite dark route very rapidly without realising. As I said, you know, it's it's not about labelling or pathologizing autism, it's about saying, right, look, we've got this issue here, we know the numbers are overrepresented. What's going on outside of the children and the young people? What's going on in society that actually predisposes these young people to go down that route? So that's the kind of main premise and underpinning perspective of the book.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Not to again go down a binary route here, but did you do any work on autistic girls and young women, for example? Are there traits or are there factors, I should say, which might lend to them being vulnerable to being a victim or a potential perpetrator, something like stalking, for example, or something else entirely in the same way that you write about boys too? And we can hopefully find solutions or ways to help them both.

SPEAKER_02 17:05

Yeah, and I think again it's bringing it back to the socio-ecological model, you know, looking at those kind of social factors that surround women and girls, how they present, if they've got autism, you know, is it differently to young men and boys? So there'll be different types of vulnerabilities, especially in the online spaces. So I think, you know, these conversations, whilst boys are overrepresented in harmful sexual behaviour, that's not to say that girls don't exist in this space, but again, there's an additional stigma when we talk about girls and women overall carrying out harmful sexual behaviour because of the role of the woman, and they're not expected to be first of all sexual beings, and they're not expected to cause harm to others, you know. There's that social perspective that women don't cause harm. So the problem is a lot more complex than we talk about, but also it might be a bit more widespread than we talk about because people can't cope with that conversation.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

No, female serial killers, for example, it it rattles people's minds. Uh, I read an amazing book called Marissa Harrison called Just as Deadly, which talks about exactly this. Yeah, yeah. I want to move on to your latest book, which is called Reframing Masculinity for Young Men and Boys. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to read it in full, but similar question as before. What inspired you to write it and what did you hope to achieve with it?

SPEAKER_02 18:20

So throughout the research studies that underpin the book, I saw societal perceptions were really impacting negatively on work with really positive work with young men and boys. And that the concept of reframing is a kind of sociological concept that actually, if you change the way that you look at something, change the lens in which you're looking at an issue, you can actually make some really big shifts in a positive way. So, in the book, I advocate for looking at men and boys through, you know, considering your own space, you know, how do you look at men and boys, what are your preconceptions? And let's unpick all of the different aspects in society that impact upon men and boys, you know, with an aim to change that wider discourse, to reframe that discourse and that that, you know, those wider public conversations that we're having. Instead of demonising young men and boys, we're going to be looking at them through a different lens in terms of all of the different factors and all of the things they have to negotiate within society today. So that's where it came from. I also produced a free resource that goes with the book that's for parents, carers, teachers, professionals to access. It's an eight-page booklet and it breaks down all of the concepts in the book and talks about how to apply those in real life in day-to-day situations, maybe in a school setting or a home setting, understanding the masculinity, the masculine context that many young men and boys are embedded within. So it breaks that down for the reader.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

I think I could well, I hope I can speak for most of the men in this space when I say that we have hopefully supported you on this book. I think that what you're doing is amazing. However, as a female, this is the most biological essentialism question I'm going to ask on this podcast, but did you have any trepidation writing about it? Because I imagine if a male academic had written a book called Reframing Femininity, I don't think it would have gone down well.

SPEAKER_02 20:08

It's a really interesting question. I think from a personal point of view, and I've set it out in the, you know, in the introduction, you know, as a woman who's lived in society for 46 years and has witnessed and and seen how sexual harassment impacts upon women, there's a certain positionality that I have that I'm really transparent about. But because of the position of men and boys in society today, I think being a woman writing a book like this about men is easier than a man. Really? Okay. I think so, yeah. How so? So I think it wouldn't land very well if it was a a man writing a similar book because the perceptions, it's like men writing about men, and people go, Well, they're really privileged, you know, so ha who are they to say? But also all of the studies that underpinned the book, you know, I let the evidence drive the book, which again, you know, if people come back to me and say, Well, you're a woman and you've written this book, I'll be like, Well, it's it's driven by evidence, it's driven by research, it's underpinned by theory. You know, this isn't me writing a book without any evidence. So yeah, I was I was quite careful around that. But I was aware, but I also think some of the things I talk about at conferences around reframing masculinity for men and boys. I don't think possibly men could stand up and say similar things to me without actually people taking offence, even though what I'm saying is underpinned by research. One of the interesting things I've noticed when I speak at conferences is that many of the people that come up to me afterwards are middle-aged women that are saying, I'm really pleased you've said that, because it seems to be it's it's a space where people, a lot of people, right, all genders want men and boys to thrive, but there's small pockets of society that don't seem to want that, but they're the ones that shout loudest. So people are really reluctant to make a stand. So it's quite often women my age coming up to me and saying, Thank you for saying it out loud. But yeah, I do think being a woman puts me in an advantage. Talking about these kind of issues?

SPEAKER_00 22:02

No, I do agree when you put it that way. You know, I've lost friends doing Vent in the podcast and covering certain issues because the people don't want to go near them, which is fine, but it's obviously a sad thing you have to accept. And I actually talk to a lot of young lads who are coming into the space and I say to them, if you want to go to the stigmatised issues, we're not the ones that kind of already been normalised in a way, you've got to be prepared for it. And it is a sad thing to accept. But yeah, there we go. In the book, you conducted eight separate studies to demonstrate your work. And as you said, you've underpinned all of it with this evidence-based lens. What did you uncover?

SPEAKER_02 22:33

I uncovered quite a lot actually. So if I go through the studies one by one, so so one of them there was a survey of the sexual behaviours of young people aged 13 to 18, and the boys' responses to that survey was really interesting, you know, because there's this assumption in society that men are sexually driven and that young men and boys have this kind of insatiable sexual appetite. However, the research and the responses, because there were some pretty detailed questions within the survey about the sexual behaviours, demonstrated to me that different boys have different experiences and different drivers, you know, and it really did highlight the importance of intersexuality and individuality around men and boys. I then analysed phone data from a phone helpline for harmful sexual behaviour. And what we were finding within that analysis, so we looked at, I think it was about a thousand call logs, and what we found was there seems to be a crunch point around the age 14-15, and it's not the really severe harmful sexual behaviours, it's this problematic area. So it's not developmentally appropriate, it's not really severe, it kind of sits in a really grey area, and the majority of those behaviours were online as well. Oh, really? Okay. So, you know, it did demonstrate to me we need to do more for young people, especially boys at a younger age, focusing on online behaviours. For me, I'm a huge advocate of really early relationships and sex education. I get quite a lot of flack for that. Interestingly, out of all of the work that I do, it's the relationships and sex education I've had the most kickback. Why is that? So there's this mutual exclusivity around talking about children and talking about sex. People can't cope with the conversation. And so when you say I want to talk to a 10-year-old about relationships, about you know how babies are made, how LGBTQ plus relationships are and sexuality is, and it's age appropriate. I advocate for age appropriate, but people don't like it. They think you're sexualising children, they think you're encouraging children to have sex. However, all the research tells us the earlier that children and young people know about sex and sexual behaviours and relationships, the more likely they are to delay sex. They call it sexual debut. You know, I always think that it's quite a comical phrase, but you know, the first time they have sex, they're more likely to delay it the more education, and the earlier the education that they have. So the evidence tells us this is what we need to be doing for the well-being of children and young people.

SPEAKER_00 24:55

However, they're they're doing it anyway, aren't they, right now? Well they're do they're drinking less, they're having sex uh at much older ages. Yeah. I thought that was just happening naturally, to be fair.

SPEAKER_02 25:04

Yeah, there's a a faction of people that really don't advocate for that. But for me, it's like it's a key child protection intervention that you can do really early on to make sure that they're protected. I've also got a project in Sierra Leone in West Africa on sexual health and period poverty. That really did inform my thinking about innovation and some of the amazing things that is going on in West Africa when I was over there. Is that you know they've got some of the young men and boys are going out doing the relationships and sex education in the villages, they're talking about periods on the wall uh at Umantok, which is one of the um NGOs over there that make period pads. It's written on the wall and it says you don't have to be anti-man to be pro-woman. And I just thought, why don't we get that? Why don't we get it? But yeah, there was the innovation I saw around sex education over there and how boys were involved really heavily in that. I carried out an analysis on incel-aligned Reddit forums, and something that that showed me was things around vulnerability and young men and boys looking for direction. So, with that project, you know, I was bracing myself to read some pretty horrible things, and there were some horrible things on there. What I wasn't prepared for was how sad I felt when I was reading some of these posts, and quite often these young men and boys are tipped into these really kind of damaging forums because they're looking for support, they feel really vulnerable, they might think, Oh my gosh, society says I need to have had sex by now and I haven't, and I don't really want to, what am I gonna do? So they're kind of googling these things and they get tipped into these forums that kind of reinforce quite damaging ideals for them and everybody else. So that was quite interesting, and it's this kind of monsterisation of them, you know, they're they're seen as social pariahs when actually the majority are young men who need a lot of support and care.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

Been covering this for a long time with William Costello. Six years ago interviewed him about this. I've lost friends over covering this as well. Um and trying to put this idea out that they're not all would-be terrorists in waiting. Overrepresentation of autism as well in the population of incels. The largest study I think William Costello did provided some very, very eye-opening insights about the demographic of incels as well, that people might not know, the ethnicities of them. I try very, very hard to humanize them in the right way because now, as you said, they're getting tipped into this space, and a lot of them get called incels before they actually become ideological incels as well, which is really sad. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:29

And I think it's something we need to keep talking about within society, even if it makes people uncomfortable. We've got to kind of look at the reality of where we're at at the moment.

SPEAKER_03 27:37

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 27:38

And then another project that I carried out was called The Voice of Boys. We're in this together, so it's the name of the book as well, and carried out a number of different focus groups. There were 16 focus groups, three steering groups, with young men aged 13 to 19 from different demographics. Some of the boys had, or young men had they'd been excluded from a number of different schools, and they came into the university and worked with us. I mean, it was great, they were so dynamic, it made me laugh. You know, the the university didn't know what I'd hear. It was lovely. It was right, it's lovely, they're so vibrant. But what I found after quite a long period of time, and some of these boys had been on other projects with me, so they knew me quite well. They dropped the social script, so that's what we want to get to. Trust.

SPEAKER_00 28:14

And you built it with them, so well done.

SPEAKER_02 28:16

Oh, thank you. They were amazing, they really were. But some of the things when the social script drops, right, it's very difficult to hear. And there were some key themes that came out of the research, so there was grievance, they feel aggrieved. Okay, so we're doing this within society, we're implanting this grievance in them because we're blaming them, but we're not allowing them to help us with the solution. Um, and so it kind of breeds this grievance against society, and in some against women, that they can't explore, they can't verbalise, so it kind of festers and they they can't talk about it. One of the other key themes was worthlessness and helplessness, and that was really disposability, yeah. And you know, I'd got to know these boys over a long period of time, and they were lovely, but there was this feeling of worthlessness, and as part of the project, had some funding to make a resource for schools in working with young men and boys, and they said there's no point, it's too late for us. That was a very sad day, you know. It's too late. Why are you making a resource for us? These are 15-year-olds. Concentrate on the younger ones or make something else. So that's I used that money to make the free resource on masculinity for parents, carers, for teachers. So that's where I repurposed that. And then what I found as well, there was a conflict between the internal self and the external self. So when I talk about internal self, what I mean is who makes you who you are, all those puzzle pieces. You know, if I think about my two sons, they're very different people, and that's their intersectional identity. But what I was finding in the men and boys was that there's this huge conflict between how they're expected to represent themselves externally, and that it's like this kind of blanket expectation on all men and boys that now follows them home in a way that it didn't when we were younger because we could shut the door on the world, whereas young people live their lives seamlessly online and offline. So there's this constant pressure from this external expectation of identity that's conflicting with who they really are, and that came out quite clearly. Another study, which was again, it was primarily boys and some girls. I think there were 10 boys and four girls on the project on creating a relationships and sex education resource. Again, this is free. It's called A Student's Guide to What You Don't Know, and it's for schools and school leadership teams on how to teach relationships and sex education, and that really taught me the importance of listening to young people. So I went in there with all these grand ideas and some funding, and I said, Right, pick a topic, add the curriculum, pick a topic in Sex Ed, and we'll make a resource. But they but very politely told me it's not what they need to spend the money on. They said, No, you can be a good teacher in this if you've got a pen and a piece of paper. We need to teach the teachers and tell them and give them tips on how to do it effectively. And it's literally written by them, word for word, it's brilliant, and they adapted it to teaching frameworks and everything. You know, it was an impressive piece of work. And again, like I said, it's it's freely available, it's a small booklet. And another project that I looked at Youth Voice was a graffiti project. I obviously didn't do the graffiti. We got um a really excellent graffiti artist from Birmingham called Void One who joined us on that project, and it was a true participatory project. They came into the university, designed what they wanted about the importance of listening to young people. We then went to a local skate park, Bourne Brooks Skate Park is a DIY skateboard that's known for its um graffiti, so we got permission for them to go and practice. Big ups. Yeah, they're brilliant, brilliant people. It was quite comical actually while we were practicing that we I've got a photo of one of the teachers walking around spraying out all the swear words in a bar in his suit. He's a lovely guy, really lovely guy. But he's following around, so spraying them out, and then this culminated in two great big 24-foot boards on the university campus that they designed, and the front cover of the book and the resource is one of the handprints of one of the boys from the graffiti project that I took. Obviously, they were meant to be doing something else, so they just stuck their hands in the paint and put them all over the board. So I took some photos, that's what's on the cover of the book. But that did show me the importance of different safe spaces for young men and boys because some of those conversations I had with the young men while we were messing about with these boards and spraying and you know, were so valuable and rich that you wouldn't get that if you sat in a room and went, you know, tell me how you feel. You know, it's it was it was constructed by them. And then the boards were yeah, it takes the pressure off. And then the boards were gifted to the schools, they were brilliant, they did a really good job on that. And then another project that I've recently finished, I looked at masculinity in the fire service, in in a local fire service, and that's the one.

SPEAKER_00 32:41

Interviewed a few lads, interviewed a few lads from the fire service on yeah, doing great work. Dean Corney's a guy you should definitely connect with Absolute Legend.

SPEAKER_02 32:48

Okay, great, put me in touch. It was a really interesting project, and again, it hit home to me the importance of individuality and intersectionality, you know, but also especially the men within the service were they're battling with that external perception of firefighter.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

Lionising them. They feel too stigmatized to reach out or people to reach into them because they think they've got it all sorted out. Yeah, that's it, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:08

There's that, and then also that it was harder for women in the fire service and not because of the men, because of the perception. So it's as if they had to work harder to prove themselves. But that didn't come from individual men that I spoke to, but it was this kind of perception that women had that they had to work harder because they get drawn into it, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, that really did highlight to me around intersectionality. So that's a bit of a kind of whistle stop tour of a few different projects.

SPEAKER_00 33:32

A great one. Before we talk about your amazing article that you wrote on the Centre for Policy Research on Women and Boys, run by my excellent and amazing friend and friend of the pod, Nick Isles. I want to talk about the grievance narrative, right? And I say this to a lot to people, and and Chris Hemings actually covered it as well. Is that when you talk to young boys and you tell them that masculinity is toxic, and then you say, actually, the patriarchy actually runs and you're actually very, very privileged, and then they see their female peers who are absolutely killing it in education. Girls are doing so well right now, and good on them, absolutely smashing it, and they're like working class, come back to class there, and then they're getting told that they're actually the winners here. That creates grievance. People need to understand that. And if you don't speak to them, listen to them, it's just gonna create a really bad snowball effect.

SPEAKER_02 34:23

Yeah, and I think you know it's already snowballing. So I think there's a couple of issues there. If you're telling somebody that having a masculine identity is a bad thing, that in itself is damaging. You know, there's nothing wrong with having a masculine identity and masculine traits, whatever gender you are, to have those traits, it's okay. But it's how you use those traits that's the important thing. One of the people that I use as a as an example of this is Marcus Rashford. You know, when you look, he's in a very masculine game, he's conventionally attractive, earns a lot of money, fast cars, big drip with the choke chains as well. But what he's done is he still maintained that masculine identity while doing something to help young people, you know, especially those living in poverty. So I think we've got to draw away from talking about masculinity as inherently damaging because it isn't. So, in terms of privilege, one of the things that we have to take a step back from in wider society is this simplistic view that you're either privileged or you're not. You can be privileged in one space in your life, but really underprivileged in another.

SPEAKER_00 35:28

100%.

SPEAKER_02 35:29

I get pelters for saying that, but it's true, it's true, and we can we can look at statistics around that and research around that in terms of where privilege works for men and where privilege doesn't work for men. The mental health base is a prime example, sexual abuse services is another example.

SPEAKER_00 35:45

Domestic abuse services as well.

SPEAKER_02 35:46

Domestic abuse services.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

Family court list goes on. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:50

Telling somebody they're privileged is is a very simplistic view of a very complex position, and it is a patriarchal society, but it's damaging for many young men and boys as well, the patriarchal society, because of the expectations on them. So nobody wins apart from the kind of real top earners, you know, the top 1 to 2% rich people in the country. None of us really benefit from the patriarchal society, but for different reasons, and I think that's the key.

SPEAKER_00 36:20

I want to now talk about the piece on consent because I've never seen a piece like that before, and absolutely well done for doing it because I think it's so needed in the conversation right now. Because I speak a lot about this to someone like Richard Pomfret, who does amazing work with Men and Boys, Boys to Men, and this idea that yes, you should have consent work for boys and girls, but it needs to not be this like imposition on boys. It can't be this like we're stopping you from becoming a sexual predator first, right? It's about creating healthy relationships, it's about emotional regulation, it's about reading social cues, all that stuff, right? So you wrote the piece, it's called The Silence Around the Rights of Boys to Say No, The Missing Conversation on Consent. Why did you write the piece in the first place, Sophie?

SPEAKER_02 37:07

So I wrote the piece for a few reasons. I think with the work that I've done with young men and boys, we've talked quite a lot about consent, but also, you know, looking at my research saying that, you know, many young men and boys aren't sexually driven as well. But there's no conversations around that. And it was the young men that in my uh we're in this together project that brought this up. So it came from them, you know, they were saying, you know, we're not able to say no for a number of different reasons, and that, you know, they showed so much agency and an understanding of the complexity of the situation. That what we would find in a girl-boy dynamic is that they would try to steer the girl to a position to say no. So they'd say things, are you sure? You don't have to, you really don't have to. Because they were aware of the complexity. If they said no, then it might make her feel rejected because we're told that men and boys are sexually driven and that's all they want. But also they knew that that's expected of them. So if the girl wanted to go through with the sexual activity, they'd do it even if they didn't want to. So that's where it came from. It came from these conversations with young men.

SPEAKER_00 38:10

And accusations as well, by the way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:12

So these conversations with the young men, it really did demonstrate to me that on a wider level, when we talk about consent, and Emily Setti talks about this in a lot of her work, so I direct your readers to her work on consent. Is that when we talk about it, we assume the man as the instigator and the girl as the gatekeeper. That's what we go to automatically. This is where we need to change these conversations around consent. It's not that people think boys can't say no. Nobody even thinks to have the conversation. Nobody's talking to boys about it and saying, you know, you can say no. And that means their partner, whoever they are, will be aware and say, actually, do you want to consent as well? So we need to change the conversation around this. Well, add to the conversation around this that boys would like to say no as well.

SPEAKER_00 38:58

What you said is really important because I've interviewed male survivors of abuse from female perpetrators, and that right there is a reason why many of them don't realize they've been abused until decades later because they can't conceive of the idea that they were able to say no. It breaks my heart to be honest, and as a fellow survivor with them, they were some of the hardest conversations I've ever had on this podcast for many reasons. You talk about this dual shame young boys have, right, in saying no. So the shame society places upon them for doing so, ridicule, status, masculinity questioned, right? And that can be by their male peers. But also, then there's the second shame of saying no to their female partner. Now, in a school context, you've obviously done a lot of work in this. I'm just hypothesising here, but it could lead to the female spreading that around school, a piece of gossip that could lead to loss of status amongst the girls that he might be kind of um pursuing. And then it could also open up to homophobic ridicule from the boys if the environment is not inclusive, right? From your experience, obviously that is a hypothetical situation. What damage have you seen this have on case studies that you've talked about? Obviously, protecting confidentiality, etc.

SPEAKER_02 40:11

Yeah, I think what we've got to do, we've got to be really careful not demonising girls. You know, if if they're talking about it, they're probably trying to make sense of rejection when they're told as women men expect us to be sexually available. Obviously, that's not the case and we shouldn't be, but that's what we're told. So if anybody's in that position, that's probably where it comes from. But in terms of things that I've seen, you know, some of the boys that I've spoken to, one of them talked about crying in year seven, and he said that he he had the Mickey taken out of him that much, he said it taught me just don't cry anymore.

SPEAKER_00 40:41

That was me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:42

It was really sad listening to him reflect back. He was in year 11 and he said, Oh yeah, I remember I cried once in year seven, never again, because of the ribbon that I got. They talked about also, even though it's not on the proportion of boys to girls, but when sexual harassment takes place, girls to boys, it's very often dismissed by teachers and not taken as seriously, not in all cases. So they're very aware of that. And if any derogatory jokes make them uncomfortable, they've got no kind of real reporting avenue for that because of the expectations we have on boys. But I need to caveat here, it's not easy for girls either at the moment for different reasons.

SPEAKER_00 41:19

Just building on what I spoke about earlier. Currently in the UK, a woman cannot legally rape a man. And I've interviewed several men who are survivors of abuse from female perpetrators, both as children and adults, who feel invisible, and this is men who are in different countries to the UK and UK-based. Does this add to the stigma? Because if they are abused, they're still not really seen as being abused, technically.

SPEAKER_02 41:44

Yeah, there's a growing body of research around women as sexual abusers because, again, there's a discomfort within society of recognising that fact because of the expected role of the women. But also running alongside that is that quite often young men have said to me, in other research that I've carried out that I haven't talked about today, is that they don't see themselves in support services. So even down to little things like having vases of flowers everywhere. Now, men like flowers the same as women, you know, but it's that suggestion, you know, that they're not welcome here, that that's not for them, it's not for them. And there are some really excellent services out there that recognise that stigma of going to ask for help, but there's a huge amount of shame around it because we expect men and boys to be sexually driven. So it's that kind of am I not who I'm supposed to be? Am I not acting how I'm supposed to be? So it takes quite a long time for those type of discussions to come out. And I think really, in terms of the research and the numbers, we won't know half of it in terms of numbers because of all these additional barriers that are in the way.

SPEAKER_00 42:47

We've got so much more to talk about, so I'll try and make this last section as quick as I can. I want to ask one more question before we move on to another hot bottom topic. You said young men in the article and boys should be recognised as experts in their own lives. What did you mean by that?

SPEAKER_02 43:02

We need to start listening. We need to start listening to them. Working with young people, especially young men and boys across the projects that I've carried out. And when I used to work in the third sector, I've very rapidly learnt that I don't know best. I might have the resources, I might have the platform, I might have the kind of concepts to help them, but we need to listen to how they feel and their position in the world today. Like I said, I'm 46. It's a very different world for me online and offline than it is for a 15-year-old.

SPEAKER_00 43:29

It's for me. I'm 32.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

So we need to stop talking over the tops of the heads, you know, and making decisions on behalf of them and actually sit down with them and in their context as well. So what's right for young men in Tower Hamlets won't be right for young men in Nuki, for example. So we have to listen to them where they're at in the context they're in, but truly listen. And if you listen to young people and you don't change anything, you haven't listened, it's tokenistic.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

Very well said. One more hot button topic pornography. A lot of the conversation right now, I feel, goes into two camps. So you've got some sex negative people, campaign groups who wish to ban porn altogether. And in April 2026, the UK government moved to ban some forms of pornography. And then in B, you've got another camp of sort of online activists who wish to increasingly ban various forms, but maybe not porn altogether, because I don't think they'd be banning Fifty Shades of Grey anytime soon. But that's just me. What is your view on the issue? Because I imagine it's nuanced, like myself. And you also probably get pelters for it too.

SPEAKER_02 44:32

Yeah, I think banning pornography may go some way in stopping the consumption in young people, but it can also push them to find it from different places. The other thing we've got to do is Darker places as well, sorry. Darker places, yeah. So the other thing we've got to remember is that pornography is not going away. It's a multi-million pound industry. We can't get rid of it, it's not going away, so we've got to take a pragmatic approach. We cannot say, oh well we'll take it off them and they won't see it. I can pretty much guarantee, and we don't say this as social scientists very often, but I can pretty much guarantee that by the time they are 18, all children will have seen pornography, whether that's unintentionally or intentionally in the UK, right? So we've got to engage with this properly but realistically, and remember that the internet exists and they're going to probably see things. I think the other thing that we need to think about around pornography is this real paradox, this complexity around pornography that we don't talk about. So pornography is widely consumed because it causes sexual pleasure in a lot of people. Okay, so there's this huge consumption of pornography going on. However, the paradox is nobody speaks about it. Nobody talks about it in a way that you talk about what you had for dinner yesterday. And I'm not advocating for that, but I'm saying that there's a huge amount of shame over something that's being consumed on a massive level. Okay, so there's this kind of conflict here. When there's young men looking at pornography and feeling pleasure, they're also told it's shameful. So within them there's a conflict because they're like, oh my gosh, does that mean I'm a bad person? Does this mean I'm awful? And it creates all this secrecy around pornography and pornography use.

SPEAKER_00 46:15

If my missus finds out she's gonna dump me, I've seen talks about that online as well. Like if my boyfriend watched porn, I would dump him. It's like, whoa, okay.

SPEAKER_02 46:23

Again, we need to look at the realities of what's going on. But there's no place for young men, especially to critically process what they're seeing. Because we don't talk about it, they can't go into schools and say, Oh, I saw this last night, and I'm trying to make sense of what I saw. I don't really understand it, or it made me feel a bit weird, or it stressed me out. There's nowhere Or it triggered me. Or it triggered me, yeah. So there's nowhere. And when I spoke about to the young men in the research studies that I've carried out, they would say we would never speak. They laughed when I said, Well, could you talk to someone at school if you saw something? And they laughed at me. They were like I'm laughing now. We were like, No, it would be raised as a safeguarding issue, and they'd tell our parents. And I said, But what if something really you saw something and it really disturbed you or upset you out? Yeah, I wanted to make sense of it, and they're like, We don't say anything to anyone. And what this does, it amplifies confusion, you know, all these conflicts around pornography. But I think we really do need to have a realistic perspective of this from a capitalist position, right? It's making people lots of money, so it's not going away, and whatever bans are in place, there will be loopholes to get around it. People will still be pushing pornography because of the amount of money involved. So we've got to start having these realistic conversations that, yeah, you might see pornography, but perhaps how you use it, how you approach it, how you understand it needs consideration. Not don't do it, you're terrible, it's really shameful. And so they're doing it secretly. And you can very quickly go down a very dark path with pornography without realizing, you know, you might click on something and not realise what it is and see something that you know can be quite upsetting if it's not contextualised properly, but there are no spaces to talk about that at all.

SPEAKER_00 47:58

As I spoke to previous guest Jerry Barnett, who wrote an amazing book called Porn Panic, I'd 100% recommend you go and read it, Sophie, if you have time. He quoted several studies, and it's an uncomfortable question, but it's a reality of the studies, which showed that the higher levels of available pornography there are in a country, the lower levels of sexual violence against women. I guess with the crude idea without going into explicit detail that the men are sort of getting it out of them. How would you respond to that argument?

SPEAKER_02 48:28

We've got to engage with this really carefully because correlation is not causation. That's what we say in my game a lot, you know. The evidence base is more mixed and it's more complex and complicated, you know, it isn't like one thing directly impacts upon another. Pornography is it's quite a dangerous position to see it as a release valve because it's too reductive of human behaviour, and it implies that sexual violence is driven by unmet sexual need in men. So again, it kind of reduces men to this sexually driven person. We know that there's more to it around sexual violence and violence against women and children. You know, we know it's about power, control, entitlement. It is sometimes and quite often about sexual gratification and about social norms, but it's not just about sexual frustration. So I think any conversation about that has to be really carefully had to acknowledge the nuances and the complexities around it, and also not to kind of do men a huge disservice by saying, Here, watch some porn and you won't go and commit a sexually violent act. I think it it really is a bit too reductionist from my position.

SPEAKER_00 49:31

Okay, okay, interesting. Coming back to that grievance narrative, something that I also really feel for boys about is that, like you said, there's a lot of vilification, a lot of demonization of their porn habits. But on the other hand, you have the explosion of something like OnlyFans, OnlyFan creators creating these quasi-I don't even know what the right phrase to use is friendships with their users who access subscribers, whatever words you want to say. And they're kind of well, some people praise OnlyFans, some people praise OnlyFan content creators through the lens of sex positive feminism or liberalistic attitudes, right? That's quite a confusing argument to give to young boys, isn't it? Because they'll be vilified if they access OnlyFans, but then the creators they're not. So it's like, where do they see themselves as impressionable young men?

SPEAKER_02 50:24

Well, it adds to that paradox, doesn't it? It adds to the complicated nature of what pornography actually is these days. It's not, you know, the top shelf magazines that are covered in brown paper, you know, or you go and sneak to the sex shop and buy a video anymore. It's everywhere, sex is everywhere, so it's where do we see pornography? What actually is pornography in in today's society? And I think we need to look at that. But the OnlyFans, the argument that you just set out does again create conflicts. These contradictions that there are no safe spaces to unpick. There are contradictions in every area of life, but we can generally sit down and talk about them and try to unpick them and try to understand them. But there are no spaces for men and boys, young men and boys, to go to unpick these issues and to talk about these conflicts within society. So I think just to adds to the complexity.

SPEAKER_00 51:15

You spoke earlier about something which was included in your TEDx talk, which I want to come to now, and it was on sex and the culture of sex. Now, one interesting little, maybe not counter-argument, but little spicy question I'll throw back at you, is that in the talk you said that the immense judgment and vilification that young parents you worked with in youth services in the talk, they were aged around 14 to 19, and you said it was all about sex. However, was it also maybe not entirely, but maybe also all about class and social class too?

SPEAKER_02 51:47

When I state that it's all about sex, it's society's problem with them is all about that they're sexually active but under 16. That's where the friction comes between young parents and wider society. You know, I it was 20 years ago, I I you know I did it for six years, and I still think about them now, you know. I just think their children will be 20. They were such inspirational young people with beautiful little children that they loved as much as I love mine, and I couldn't understand why society hated them so much. And you know, it took me years to try to figure out, you know, I got to know these beautiful human beings, but the discourse was that they're really bad people, and I couldn't understand it. I quite rapidly realised so there is a class issue which I'll come on to in a second, but there's also again, as I talked about it earlier, the mutual exclusivity of sex and young people. So there's no more an advert that you've had sex, really, for the majority of people than a big pregnant belly or a pushchair. So, from that respect, that's what I mean when I say it's all about sex, is that people are distinctly uncomfortable with young people having sex, and if you've got a baby, you've probably had sex. But the social class position is really interesting. So when you look at some statistics in some areas, the abortion rates are higher to young parents in more affluent areas, so it does come back down to what certain perspectives value in life, and I'm not saying people from affluent areas don't value children, of course they do, but there's also that additional focus on career and progress, status, yeah, and status. So social class is a huge factor, but what a lot of the research says, and my research says, is that actually a teenage pregnancy and having a baby can be a way out of social disadvantage rather than a compounding factor. And many of the young people that I work with, they were in a bit of a tricky situation before they had a child, and then all of a sudden they were like, Oh no, like I really love this little human being, I'm gonna sort all my stuff out now, and it really drove them and it was a real bridging into things like education.

SPEAKER_00 53:46

That thought just brought me on to a point where I've spoken to young dads as well, and when I say young dads, I mean sort of under the age of 25, and they might have had issues going on with themselves, and they've said to me, Fred, having a baby made me sort myself out in a way that perhaps it wouldn't have done otherwise. So I think you make a really, really great point there. I want to talk briefly, just before we reflect, on an interview that British and Irish Lions coach and Ireland men's head coach, rugby union league legend Andy Farrell, when he published his book, he spoke about the impact of having his son, Owen, first son, sorry, when he was 16 years old. And I didn't actually realise just how young he was when he had kids. And he said how much shame he felt because we were brought up in the right way, was his quote, by his parents. Likewise, his now wife. So this idea of teenage pregnancy was not just his failure, but a failure of his parents in his view, too. Is that another factor here?

SPEAKER_02 54:40

Yeah, there's a huge stigma. There's not a lot of work that's been done around young fathers. Really? Yeah, I'd steal your listeners to the work of Anna Tarrant, Professor Anna Tarrant. She does a lot on young fathers specifically. But what I found when I was working with young parents is that on the forms for young women, it would ask, Are you a parent? On the forms for men that are not in education, uh, employment or training, there was no box to tick to say if they were a father, so they were already discounted. And in conflict to kind of wider social assumptions, many of the dads were still involved with the children, you know, and still with the partner. And if they weren't still with the partner, they were still involved in the baby's life. But yeah, dads, it's a whole different complex social assumptions they have to navigate with a lot of shame around that, and it's like you should have known better. And it's seen as a really terrible thing. But a lot of the young people, you know, once they decided to keep the baby, they were quite excited. And why wouldn't you be? You know, if you're going to keep a baby, you want them to be excited about the birth of the baby, but it was very difficult for them to say that in wider society, but especially for the dads, but there was hardly any funding for them, and the game's shifted a little bit, but not as enough as it should.

SPEAKER_00 55:52

Yeah, I mean, you you only have to look at programmes like 16 and pregnant or team mum, which may have helped decrease team pregnancy rates, but probably also inversely added a bit of stigma too. But yeah, separate conversations, separate podcasts. I want to reflect now because I could talk to you all day. So what's been your proudest achievement on this journey so far, first of all?

SPEAKER_02 56:12

Gosh, I think achieving my PhD. I think because where I'm from, my background, that would never be reachable. That isn't something that was ever for me. I feel very humble and lucky to have been able to do this 10, 15 years ago, you know, if you'd have said to me I'd I'd have the title doctor, I'd have just laughed at you.

SPEAKER_00 56:30

Hopefully, maybe professor soon, eh?

SPEAKER_02 56:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 56:34

And second of all, before we move on to your mental health journey, what has this academic journey so far? I know you've got loads more positive stuff to do, taught you about yourself.

SPEAKER_02 56:44

Oh wow, about myself. I'm quite dogged with the problem, but I don't mind putting my head above the parapet and challenging social discourse and social norms. As long as it's informed by research, you know, we have to have these difficult conversations. And so I've I've learned that I'm not too bad at having those and I don't mind doing it. And for academics who don't like to do it, that's fair enough as well. And I'm quite good, I think, because I worked in the third sector of making links, making links between kind of where academic practice can inform professional practice.

SPEAKER_00 57:20

We've talked all about your amazing academic journey so far. So let's go deeper and talk about your own mental health journey. So I ask all my special guests on this topic this question first. You can take it any way you want. Take me back to early life teenage years and looking back, were there any early mental health experiences? If any, who's the Sophie? We meet here.

SPEAKER_02 57:38

Yeah, so when I think about myself in my teenagers, I think about the school system and how claustrophobic I found it. I really struggled, not academically through school, but I struggled with the school systems. I struggled with the hierarchy within schools. I mean, I had some wonderful friends and there were some wonderful teachers, but in the main, I found it very difficult to fit in into the systems within schools. And looking back, you know, it must have caused me a lot of stress. But I didn't see it at the time. But I was very outgoing, very loud, very outspoken, still really aligned to social justice even when I was young. But I felt really restricted by the systems of schools, and I think you know, I see that in a lot of young people that I work with today, that the school system is constantly letting them down because it's trying to kind of, you know, the same, put us a square peg in a round hole. It's not for some people, and you know, leaving school can really set them free if the school is quite confined. So, yeah, that's what I think back at. But I think back at my teenage years quite fondly, I was a bit wild. That's really the kind of teenage me. It was a bit like me now, but quite a lot more amplified.

SPEAKER_00 58:46

Pocket rocket, shall we say? I want to come back to social class because you're a woman from a working class background, and I can tell that it's shaped you in so many ways. What positive values did that childhood give you? So, for example, power of community, value of money or humility, anything else, and what challenges did it provide that you had to overcome when you left that environment? So I'm thinking, obviously, I'm thinking off the top of my head here, imposter syndrome, accentism, anything else?

SPEAKER_02 59:16

So, first of all, the positive things is I think because of the sense of community and the way that people speak to each other, I think when I'm talking about really sensitive issues, the working class probably comes out. There's a comfortability around these conversations, especially talking to people from perhaps disadvantaged backgrounds, because I don't have to tell them I know what it's like. I think you can just pick up from people if they understand your position. And that's not to say researchers don't do a good job if they weren't working class, but I think it's a very different dynamic. I am humble, I know the value of money. My children constantly moan at me because I keep every bit of food, I don't throw anything away. So all the leftovers they get boxed up and put in the fridge, even the smallest portions.

SPEAKER_00 59:55

Every morsel. I love it.

SPEAKER_02 59:57

Every bit, every bit. So that comes from the working class background and just seeing people where they're at and not making assumptions about them. You know, you just see the individual. So I think that's really kind of set me in a in good stead. In terms of negative, I think I found negotiating university and university systems really difficult. And it's not the university's fault, it is just being from a different country. When you're working class and you go and work at a university, you have to learn a completely different language. There's all these nuances and unspoken things in a way that working class will just people generally just tell you if something's wrong or you know, they've got a problem with what you're doing. There's so many different unwritten rules within that kind of middle class environment. Yeah, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:38

I've struggled with that, and I come from a middle class background, but because I came from a state school upbringing, that's something I found really difficult, and obviously the autism into play, like those social cues and like saying things without saying things and all these different nuances. I'm like very direct in the workplace, and that's sometimes been my downfall and sometimes been a positive, so I completely agree.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:56

Yeah, I think I can really relate to that. You know, I think sometimes within the university sector, and there are some really wonderful people at the university, and I do love it there, but you know, I'll say things and people are like, I can't believe she just said that. I get that a lot. But I think in terms of imposter syndrome, and that hasn't come from outside influences, that's come from me. People have always been really, really encouraging. You know, I've had some wonderful people support me through my career, and nobody ever who's close to me said you you're not going to be able to get a PhD. Everybody was like, Oh my god, that's amazing. By the time I got to finishing my PhD, you know, I thought, gosh, has this all been for nothing? What if I don't pass? My kids have lived on tuna, pasta, and beans on toast for the past four years. What if this had been for nothing? You know, so that's self-doubt. It's changed a lot, I think, over the years. I think I was really aware of my accent, and I would be really careful about the words I used when I was doing my master's degree.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:46

You speak, sorry, or you write down how I speak. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:50

So I was really aware of my accent when I was doing my master's, so I'd be really careful about the words I used, how I spoke. As soon as I got the master's degree, and as soon as I got the PhD, I just went back to normal. But it was as if I had to prove I've got the proof, you know, even though I speak the way I speak and I come from my background, I've still got this PhD. I think I had to prove it to myself, and so now I'm quite comfortable in my own skin in terms of where I'm from, and I kind of I've learned the language of the university, I've learned the systems. So I just hope, you know, in some respects I can give it back to students that are kind of on that journey, is to say, look, it's it's perfectly normal to kind of sit there and think, I'm from 20 minutes up the road and I have no idea what someone's just said to me. I felt like I was from overseas. I had a I had a conversation with a Turkish academic, and the way she was talking about not understanding some of the nuances in the language, I thought she's talking about me, but she's from Turkey and I'm from 20 minutes away, you know, because of the social systems that you know, and it's nobody's fault, you know. I'm not looking for blame within the university at all, but it's a very tricky thing to negotiate when you're from a different class background.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:54

Before we reflect, I want to briefly talk about motherhood because you are the mother of four children, and I think some would look at your life and say, You have it all, Sophie, but it's not quite as simple as that because you have combined so many other things, you've juggled so many things in your life to get to where you are today. And there's one question I want to ask because there's a saying, I can't remember who said it, but I hear it a lot. It might even be outdated now, to be fair. And it says, if you want to have kids, you have to sacrifice a career, and if you want a career, you have to sacrifice kids, right? And the other is you can have it all, but you can't have it all at once. Which of those do you share more commonality with and why?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:32

I think I just had it all at once. I look back and I think, gosh, I can't believe I did all that. I think I think we have to be really careful how we frame this conversation because just because I did it, I don't want to shame anyone who concentrates entirely on being a parent or concentrates entirely on their career. You know, we've all got different paths. It's not easy, you know, it's not easy all the juggling and the working late and then kind of stopping at three o'clock, picking up the kids and not having meetings after three because of the noise in my house. All sorts of different things that you have to juggle. And I think you get parent guilt as well. You know, you get this real push-pull. Am I doing the right thing? Constantly questioning yourself, am I doing the right thing? Concentrating on this career. And it wasn't until two of my children, the two older ones-I mean, that I've got two younger ones as well. The only way that dissipated that guilt was when I spoke to them about it, and I said, 'I've always felt I'm not doing the right thing, am I?' And then my eldest son just said, uh, yeah, I want a house to inherit. Carry on. So they won't bother. So they're they're they're quite comical in the great human beings. But the two older ones are saying, No, you're doing the right thing. You know, you're a really good role model for us, and it hasn't taken you away from us. And I think, especially being a woman, you feel that real push-pull of the role, you know, within society. So, no, it's not been an easy journey. I've got a really supportive husband as well. Yeah, he's a builder, he's a site manager for construction, and he always keeps me grounded. We've been together about 26 years, maybe more, roughly. Yeah, he's a good guy.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:56

Just building on that, then, because I obviously love to big up men as much as I can on this podcast. And I also think that a lot of men, a lot of great men, I should say, do their best work in silence, you know, they don't want the plaudits, they don't want the accolades, the recognition. And sometimes that means we don't hear as much about them. So I'm going to give you a chance to get some good wife points here. How has he supported you to be the best academic you can be and the best mum you can be, and woman as well?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:24

Oh, he's been great, actually. You know, he has this kind of unwavering belief in what I'm trying to achieve, even when I haven't seen you. The amount of times that I've said to him, I don't think I can do this, and he's like, Of course you can do it. You know, you can do it. It doesn't make him uncomfortable that my career's going the way it's going, or that I travel a lot for work. You know, he's just hands-on with the kids and like you know, he works long hours as well in construction. But yeah, he's the one who's never doubted me when I've doubted myself. And I think you need people like that. Or when you get a bit of imposter syndrome and you think, gosh, why are they asking? Me to do this, why am I on here? And he was like, You've made your bed, you lying it, you know, you can't just put all this research out there and then drop it and walk away. He said, You you know, so he gives me the reality check as well, and we we get so Midland. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:17

Just building on that, actually, I've spoken to Russell Payne, an amazing man who has a podcast called The Talking Tradesman. He does a lot of work for men and women in the trades. Given your husband's subject area of expertise, shall we say, and obviously the very high levels of mental health challenges that men in the construction and general trades face, is that an area you considers jumping into as well, potentially in the future?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:43

I think so. I mean the suicide rates in construction are horrific.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:47

It's so heartbreaking, but it's the perfect storm, isn't it? Because you've got a lot of overseas workers, they're self-employed. Solo work. Yep. Big work pressures. So he, because he's seen a lot of things over the last, I don't know, 20, 30 years, a lot of really sad stories. He volunteers for a mental health charity, specifically for construction, and looking at all of those masculinities. So it's definitely on the cards. I mean, that there's some research going on at the moment, but not enough in construction. So we do need to focus on our construction workers a lot more in terms of their well-being because it's a very masculine environment. You know, if you have a day off, you don't get paid. You can't have a day off for mental health, for example, without having shame associated with it. So we've still got a long way to go in construction, but I think that you know the gears are changing. We're starting to think, hang on, we we need to do more here.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:34

And there comes a lot of financial pressure there, too, as well. If they are the breadwinner of the household, for example, and loads of other pressures. And maybe I can get on the podcast or someone related to that charity soon, Sophie. We'll see. I want to reflect now on your mental health journey. So, first of all, similar question as before, what has this mental health journey taught you about yourself?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:51

I'm pretty resilient. I think it's a bit of a buzzword, isn't it, at the moment? But I suppose I'm a marathon runner, not a sprinter. So I'm quite good at playing the long game with things. And it's taught me as well that I'm really goal-focused. Which is something I didn't realise until I started doing all of the qualifications that I've done. You know, I thought if I set a goal, I will find any way I can to meet the goal. But it did show me that sometimes I can be a bit too goal-focused, and sometimes the journey is just as important as achieving the goal. And I learned that, you know, over the last 10 years, really, that sometimes you've got to take a step back and have a think and reflect on who you are and where you're at. And if you don't meet the goal, it doesn't mean that you failed, it just might be like a redirect. So, yeah, that's what I've learned. I've learned that I've got a real strong disposition for social justice. I don't like things that aren't just, and I really like working with young people because they're so vibrant and optimistic.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:44

And as a final question before we move on to our quickfire mental health chat, if you could go back and talk to that Sophie who was working in youth services with those vibrant teenage parents, the 26-year-old Sophie about to become a mum for the first time, or the Sophie about to enter academia for the first time, what would you say to her, knowing what you do now, if anything at all?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:07

I'd just say, um, just keep going. Don't doubt yourself, just keep going, and it'll be alright.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:17

Our final topic of conversation, Sophie, on this wonderful podcast, and it's one I try and have with all of my special guests, if we have time. It is a general natter and quickfire chat about our mental health. So, firstly, how is your mental health out of ten?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:30

I'd say it's around about an eight, nine. I feel very lucky.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:33

Oh, amazing. What age were you when you became self-aware of your mental health for the first time and you realised that the feelings you were having weren't physical and they were actually in your mind?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:43

Not till I was much older. I would say late teenager, before I made that separation between physical self and emotional self.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:49

And was it a eureka moment or a gradual process or both?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:53

I think a gradual process when I look back and I can only see it with hindsight. It wasn't like something that was really apparent at the time.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:59

Can you remember the first or the most important conversation you've ever had with someone about your mental health? So who was it with? What did you say, and how do you look back on it? Did it feel like the stereotypical weight had been lifted, or on the other, something quite easy and normal to do?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:14

Yeah, I think it's really difficult to pinpoint an exact instance where that's happened. But as I've got older, it's got easier to verbalise when I'm not happy with something or not comfortable with something or seen something and I don't like it, you know, on the TV or things like that that might upset me. I've learned that, you know, you don't have to be tough in all situations. You can say, I don't want to do this, or I don't want to go there, or I don't want to watch this. That sounds like I'm watching really terrible things, but you know what I mean is just in day-to-day life, it's okay to be humble about yourself and you don't have to be tough all the time.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:46

Yeah, I try never to take myself too seriously. I think that works well for life. What triggers, if any, do you have in your mental health? So it could be things people say to you, could be a sound, smell, taste, sensation, or have you not figured all of them out yet? Or have any at all?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:00

It's when things conflict with social justice, when something isn't just. Like I get angry and I'm a I'm not an angry person really. I get angry about issues, but it really does, and sometimes I have to be really careful how much I'm reading and what I'm looking at in terms of what's going on in the world. Bearing in mind that I research a lot of really upsetting things. I think I've put really clear boundaries around myself and acknowledging when I can't read a paper, a certain academic paper at that time. So yeah, it's when there's social justice issues, you know, that it really does trigger a lot of anger.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:33

Conversely, what positive tools do you use to improve your mental health and help you feel better? Which ones have worked for you and which ones have you tried but haven't?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:41

I think spending time with my children because they don't care if I'm a doctor or not, you know, having a laugh with them and them telling me I'm wrong most of the time. Um, that's really good for my mental health.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:53

Kids, tell your mum she's right sometimes. Come on.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:56

And then I like walking. I like going out walking because it stops me working as well. So, you know, so going at I don't know, local walks or I always look for where there's a walk to kind of help me clear my head. So that's really positive. And I've got some good friends and good family.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:10

You're an academic, so I hope you've got a good answer to this one. What is the best book or a mental health Bible you've read for your mental health? Now it can be self-help or mental health related, it doesn't have to be, it can be fiction, anything you want.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:22

From my perspective, I think it's it'll be different for different people. That sounds like a bit of a politician's answer. It's not, I think because as long as any book is positive for the person but acknowledging the complexities around it, that's the important thing, you know. So some might go to fiction, some non-fiction. And it also depends what mood I'm in, you know, what I feel like reading.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:44

If there was a mantra in life that summed up your mental health, what would it be and why? Just keep going.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:53

Keep standing, keep going. You'll be alright.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:57

What do you love about yourself?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:00

I'm quite dogged with issues, and I quite like the academic side of me, and I like being able to make the connections between lots of different concepts for the good of people, so translating the abstract to the concrete.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:13

Get you a girl who can do both, eh? And as a final question on this amazing podcast, Sophie, it's a broad one, you can answer it any way you want. But what more do you think we have to do to ensure people from all backgrounds, all social classes, all walks of life feel comfortable and safe and opening up about their mental health issues or just their general mental health, if most importantly, they want to do it.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:39

We need to see people as individuals and stop grouping them and making assumptions about them because of what they look like or how they speak or where they're from. We need to start stripping it back and looking at the individual person and talking about that we need to do that in wider society. So change the conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:57

Sophie, it has been an honour and a privilege. Thank you so much for coming on the Just Checking In podcast and talking to me, pal.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:03

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:08

Well, that's all we've got time for in this episode of the Just Check In Pod. A big thank you to Sophie for being my special guest and for letting me check in with her. I'll put some links to where you can buy Sophie's books and find out more about all the brilliant work she does on social media in the show notes. As always, thank you to all the vendors who've tuned into this episode. Remember, if you've liked what you've heard, please give it a share on social media by tagging us at VentHelp UK. Tell your friends, family, or work colleagues about us. If you're feeling generous, please write us a review and give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what we're doing, please go to patreon.com slash event helpuk and support us further. Or you can make a one-off donation to our PayPal. Both those links are on our link tree. That's linktr.ee slash vent helpuk. We hope to check in with you again very soon. And remember, guys, it is always okay to vent.