Research has found that 24% of boys aged 16 to 24 in the UK self-harm. Sadly, the culture of men not showing emotions or talking through their emotional concerns has a direct link to the suicide rate in older men. Young men need to talk about their feelings and emotions before they become men who haven’t learnt how to, and feel they have no way of coping but to take their own lives. Self-harm in young men and teenage boys may exhibit differently from females. Males self-poison with paracetamol or ibuprofen as a way of coping with daily anxieties and fears; the next highest form of self-harm in young men is cutting and hanging. Punching walls or regularly fighting are forms of self-harm that are missed because the behaviour is seen as aggressive rather than emotional.

Councils are accused of hiding the scale of the rough sleeping crisis in England by changing the way they compiled figures for the 2018 official count. For example, Southend had 72 people sleeping rough in 2017. Then in 2018 they did their street count on one especially cold night late November night and submitted a street count of 11. Official government statistics reported a 2% fall in rough sleeping in England in 2018 after seven consecutive years of rises. Critics suggest the fall in official numbers does not reflect the reality of homelessness. Homeless charity Crisis estimated that over 22,000 people spent Christmas sleeping rough or in cars, trains, buses or tents. The official figure was 4,677. We can pray that this report will highlight councils’ smokescreens, and prompt authorities to face the reality of our rough sleeping crisis and do more to eradicate it.

A Twitter video of a street preacher’s arrest in London has been viewed over 1.8 million times. It shows the man confronted by two police officers warning he would be arrested for a breach of the peace if he refuses to leave the area. One said, 'You're disturbing people, you're causing problems, and you're breaching their peace.' The man says, 'I need to tell people Jesus is the only way, the truth and the life’, to which the officer replies, 'I appreciate that, but nobody wants to hear that, they want you to go away’. When the man told his reasons for preaching, they handcuffed him and took his Bible. The preacher said, 'No, no, no, don't take my Bible away!’ It is unclear what he said that triggered the incident. An eyewitness said, ‘This man was preaching and did nothing wrong, he had a hostile person near him.’ He was later released.

A review was launched into working practices at Amnesty International after two staff members, Gaetan Mootoo and Rosalind McGregor, committed suicide last year. The review found that ‘organisational culture and management failures’ were the root cause of deep staff unhappiness in Amnesty’s ‘toxic culture’ of workplace bullying. Their efforts to address its problems were described as ‘ad hoc, reactive, and inconsistent’, and the senior leadership team was described as out-of-touch, incompetent and callous. There was bullying, harassment, sexism, racism, and poor management. Decentralising the organisation from its global headquarters in London had caused unnecessary turmoil and compounded job pressures. Seven management team members acknowledged that there was a climate of tension and mistrust, and have offered to resign.