Karyn McCluskey, who headed up the pioneering Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) in the early 2000s, told the Sunday Mail that today’s youth now face “a different reality”.

Scotland’s former violence reduction tzar has warned social media, toxic influencers like Andrew Tate and Covid lockdowns are fuelling a terrifying new wave of youth violence.

Karyn McCluskey, who headed up the pioneering Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) in the early 2000s, told the Sunday Mail that today’s youth now face “a different reality”.

It follows an alarming eruption of violence among young men in Scotland, including the tragic alleged murder of 15-year-old Amen Teklay in Glasgow earlier this month.

In schools, new figures released last week, point to a worrying rise in violent incidents, with more than 24,000 this school year so far – on track to meet the record-breaking total of 40,000 in 2023-24.

McCluskey, who now heads up public body Community Justice Scotland, is widely credited with helping to turn the tide on knife crime in Glasgow 20 years ago with her work with the VRU – and ending the city’s status as murder capital of Europe.

However she warned youngsters and teens now face a more challenging reality.

She said: “These kids are living a different life from what I did.

“These kids are digital natives, they are online. They are having conversations with people globally, not just in Scotland or in their scheme or whatever else, they are connecting to a whole range of hideous stuff.

“We are too slow to catch up, too slow to realise what’s happening to them, how they’re getting changed, how their behaviours are getting changed.”

McCluskey highlighted how new hit Netflix show Adolescence has sparked a conversation about online influencers, misogyny and social media bullying.

The four-part crime drama, co-written and created by Stephen Graham, follows a schoolboy accused of killing his female classmate.

Meanwhile British-American influencer Andrew Tate, who has his 10.8 million followers on X, and his brother Tristan returned from the US last week to Romania, where they face human trafficking and other charges.

McCluskey said: “Parents are now asking, ‘you think because he’s in his bedroom, or she’s in her bedroom, that she’s fine?’

“She’s not fine. She’s connected to the world, to people in America, to people in India, to people all over – and actually, you’ve invited them into your house. You’ve got them in your house.

“You’ve got the Andrew Tates, you’ve got all these toxic influencers and pick-up artists and everything else in your house and in your bedroom.

“You need to be interested, and you need to be having that conversation where you’re sitting around the dinner table and say ‘let’s put the phone away’.”

She added: “Just because you have social media, it doesn’t mean you’re going to become violent.

“But if you’ve got lots of the other things happening – kids getting excluded, tough lives at home – then social media can be like pouring petrol on the flames.”

McCluskey stopped short of full support for a ban on social media for under-16s, however – a move First Minister John Swinney has vowed to consider.

She said: “I don’t think a social media ban is achievable.

“Do I think it would be good for their health and wellbeing if they weren’t on it so much, and didn’t have access to it during schooling?

“I’ve seen it and I don’t think it’s a good thing. Teachers find it really difficult.

“But we’ve opened Pandora’s Box, haven’t we?”

McCluskey also pointed to the impact of Covid and the two years of disruption to in-class learning that pupils faced.

She said: “These are kids who were in Covid lockdowns for two years and then we demonise them saying, ‘Oh, they’re all violent kids.’

“But the problem is these kids have no idea how to manage their emotions.

“We have not recovered well as a country from the pandemic.

“Adults coped with it better than kids did, because their brains are still developing and they need connection and meeting their friends and being idiots and playing football and doing all the stuff kids do.

“We know there’s more kids now not going to school, but education still really matters, being around their peers and learning together.

“We’ve never been through this before. We never had kids locked in for two years, unable to connect with their friends other than online – we actually almost forced them online, and that made it worse.

“They didn’t learn the skills you learn about how to walk away from a fight, how to bring it down, how to speak to each other, how to disagree well about things.

“We need to teach young people that.”

McCluskey also called for funding to be spent on prevention and tackling violence.

She said: “Violence is a bit like whack-a-mole. You push one thing down, something else pops up.

“If I look at violent crime, it’s come down. Rates of people admitted to hospital because of violence have plummeted.

“We’ve got less facial injury – the old Glasgow smile we don’t get as much anymore.

“It’s changing – but that doesn’t mean you can take your eye off the ball, and you still need to do all the preventative things and invest in that.

“You can have a terrible murder and it costs millions and millions of pounds to investigate, then £50,000 a year to lock somebody up, and you start to do the maths.

“I’d much rather put all that money into prevention.

“Sometimes you look at the person who committed the crime and you think, they really weren’t hiding it.

“We knew they had all these predicting factors, but then we waited until they fell off a cliff, and then we say ‘let’s jail them’, and it’s just that bit too late.

“Prevention has to matter and it has to matter when the budgets are set.”