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I keep hearing from parents that they can’t bring themselves to watch Adolescence. A series, which opens with the arrest of a young lad in his bedroom at the family home, is just too distressing even to think about. And yet, it really is a must-watch, as upsetting as the show is.
And many are watching. The show has become a national talking point, with Keir Starmer saying he’s watched it with his teenage children. Will this lead him to take serious action and, as many are calling for, look at a social media ban for children under-16?
“These social media spaces aren't benign, they're not neutral, with a child's best interests at heart,” says Daisy Greenwell from grassroots campaign Smartphone Free Childhood. “Their only interests are snaring as much of their time and attention as they possibly can, so that they can turn that into data and turn that into money for shareholders.”
A survey by the Youth Endowment Fund last year showed that one in four teenagers have been shown real-life violence on social media platforms served to them algorithmically, and that 68 per cent of teens were now afraid to go out.
“I think it's been almost a decade for the Online Safety Act to come into force,” says Greenwell. “That’s trying to make the internet and social media safe for kids, to make the content less harmful, and so predators can't contact kids as easily. But that's assuming children should be in these places at all.”
Her organisation asks parents to create their own local groups and to sign a pact to avoid giving children a smartphone. She says their parent groups have come alive with discussions about Adolescence, and this really does feel like the show is operating like an intervention.
Boys and the manosphere
The show particularly addresses is the effect on boys. Today’s online world can quickly draw in young men into extreme ‘manosphere’ content delivered by Andrew Tate and his kind. In a speech this week, former England manager Gareth Southgate called those people, “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers whose sole drive is for their own gain.”
He described a social environment where, “too many young men feel uncomfortable opening up to friends or family... when they struggle, young men inevitably try to handle whatever situation they find themselves in, alone... they spend more time online falling into unhealthy alternatives like gaming, gambling and pornography.”
It’s exactly this environment Adolescence explores.
The boy at the centre of the drama, Jamie (played by Owen Cooper) is not an incel. He tells his child psychologist Briony this, and that he doesn’t hate women. But then goes on to demonstrate just how the whole manosphere culture has warped him.
The way he tells the story, is that his victim, Katy, had sent topless photos to a boy at school, who then shared it around everyone else. With Katy devastated Jamie thought she would be “weak” and took the chance to asked her out on a date. She laughed him away and then mocked him as an incel on Instagram. He felt he was bullied. He confronted her, carrying a knife, and his temper struck.
But he tells Briony that he thinks he’s better than other boys he knows because during the attack he didn’t touch her body, “anything I liked, but I didn’t. Most boys would have.”
“Do you understand what death is?” Briony says to him, appalled.
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What we have here is an intelligent kid with clear problems being made into a monster by a school culture steeped in manosphere disinformation. He considers himself ugly and thinks Katy picked on him because he was the ugliest of all the boys. He also lies about his sexual encounters, thinking a 13 year old should be active in this way.
This is a world of fear. The boys are afraid of girls, viewing them through this content as some kind of alien, hostile group who value only good-looking boys – the 80:20 rule is referred to, that 80 per cent of girls only like 20 per cent of the boys – and have to be manipulated or dominated to control, with sex being the primary objective. The girls are fearful too, as well they might be.
And all this is boiling in online areas, away from parental eyes.
Author and psychologist, Steve Biddulph, who wrote the lauded Raising Boys and the recent Wild Creature Mind, says, “Adolescence is television and filmmaking at its very best, and also it very skillfully brings together the forces that are causing so much damage and suffering for young people and their families in the 21st century.”
He praises its depiction of fathers trying to step away from the violence dished out in previous generation (in the form of Graham’s Eddie), the lack of effective male leadership in schools.
“And of course,” he says, “The horrendous stealing of childhood, and of young love, by the intrusion of ugly and violent pornography into the bedrooms of a generation of shockingly young children and teens. It is very hard to navigate early sexuality and romance when such a debased view of the opposite gender is flooded into your eyeballs and your mind.
“[The show also reveals how] this confusion and mistrust between boys and girls into tangible hate by opportunistic idiots with misogynist YouTube channels.”
Social Toxicity
A new study from Dublin City University demonstrates how quickly algorithms feed ‘male supremacist’ material to young men’s accounts. They created different dummy profiles of different types of users on TikTok and YouTube to test how soom they were recommended such material.
“All of the accounts...were fed toxic content within the first 23 minutes of the experiment, and manosphere content within the first 26 minutes,” reports the study. If an interest in that content was shown, the amount of anti-feminist or ‘toxic’ recommendations increased exponentially.
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Yet this isn’t to say that boys are simply taking in this kind of material without critical judgement. If you speak to teenage boys, you’ll find cynicism about Tate.
A 2023 YouGov poll found that one in six boys aged six to 15 had a positive view of him. But the majority had a negative opinion of him, including 63 per cent of 13-15 year olds. When quizzed, it seemed the things they did like about him were the motivational elements, not the misogyny.
Now of course, as Southgate pointed out, Tate deliberately uses lifestyle entrepreneurial content as a means to grab young men’s minds. Seeding in misogyny is merely one part of the cold exploitation of alienated young men for his own monetary gain. And many young lads see through this too. However, they may also listen simply because they are being demonised elsewhere
There is a huge risk in underestimating boys, stereotyping them and creating more alienation. School lessons around equality and initiatives which focus on female achievement and LGBTQ+ inclusivity have been a welcome development in education. However, if boys are painted as the main problem to be overcome and not also celebrated too, then that’s troubling. The idea that certain little kids are inherently ‘bad’ due to their sex is a reductive one, to say the least.
Many would say these are necessary correctives to a male-dominated society. And making things too delicate around boys risks something like 2023’s Maaate campaign by the Mayor of London’s office, a well-intentioned but flat attempt to tackle misogyny and violence against women through mild banter. If a friend says something sexist, us blokes should say, “Maaate.” Women can sleep easy now...
Misogynistic and sexual crimes by adult males need hard edged approaches with regards to punishment. But when it comes to boys and prevention, there must be nuanced understanding rather than damnation. Particularly since, again, boys aren’t stupid. They can see through overly-performative adult box ticking exercises in which they are the fall guys.
Speak to an evolutionary psychologist and they’ll tell you that studies show boys and girls are not the same. In the long view of behaviour studies, boys are more likely to be violent, more likely to have problems communicating, and are more prone to risky behaviour.
One aspect of this is a tendency for boys not to explore or talk about their problems. Shame, self-disgust, rage can build since it is unexpressed. The Campaign Against Living Miserably point to self-isolation, an inability to express their pain, as a key reason why three times as many men take their own lives as women.
In this manner, the social media age appears to be particularly damaging for boys as it diverts them even further into isolation. Where, in those silent hours alone, extreme material can be views and extreme opinions can take hold.
The hope in Adolescence
Adolescence depicts all this in devastating fashion. In one moment, the parents of the boy, Stephen Graham’s Eddie and Christine Tremarco’s Manda talk about where it all went wrong. Eddie worries if his temper has been passed on, but stresses he never hit Jamie like his own father had hit him.
Manda, says, “He never left his room, he’d would come home slam the door go straight on his computer. I’d see the light on at one o’ clock in the morning. I’d knock ad say Jamie you’ve got school tomorrow. The light would turn off but he wouldn’t say anything. “
Then as Eddie breaks down over whether they should have done more, his wife says, “I think it’d be good if we accepted maybe we should have done.”
Which is really where we are at now with Adolescence. What next? Well, there is hope.
The show depicts a way out in the parallel story of DI Bascombe (played by Ashley Walters) and his own son Adam, who is at the same school as Jamie.
In one crucial moment, Bascombe, having been at the school looking for the murder weapon and seeing the awful behaviour of the other kids, he offers his son a lift home and to go for some food. Previously the pair have been frosty and distant. Bascombe breaks this by saying to Adam, “I love you and I want to spend time with you.” Soon they’re both laughing and easy together.
“There’s so much power in speaking your feelings,” Walters told the Standard, “Letting them be words in your mouth instead of thoughts in your mind. Sometimes things don’t come out right. But especially for men, that’s all fear-based. What’s behind anger and aggression? Fear. It’s people struggling to say how they feel because they’re scared of being judged.”
This is what the show is really all about. That something can be done.
Biddulph feels the show is not without flaws, “its premise is ‘how could this happen in a loving family?’ And in fact, while it is just plausible, it is incredibly unlikely, because the risk factors for young people who kill are actually that they have a violent father, and Jamie did not.”
Distant mothers, neurodivergence and a lack of adult care around you are other contributing factors, while in the show Jamie has a loving family around him. Biddulph does see that while the show may not echo most of these real-life cases, it was doing so to make a point:
“The only error [Jamie’s parents] made was one being made by a whole generation of parents until we began to get a handle on this. Kids should not have online devices in bedrooms.
The damage of pornography lies in the doseage – occasionally seeing something is going to happen, but getting addicted requires daily long access in privacy, and that is something that a parent can and should simply not allow.
The same is true for online influencers. Jamie was 13. He is a child. What is he doing cruising the alleyways of the internet when we would never let him cruise the alleyways of his town?”
And this here is the action point. We need to adjust parenting, and teaching, because smartphone culture has got out of hand and it is dangerously affecting our children. We – and the government – need to stand up to the tech companies.
“I would like to see them raise the age of social media to 16,” says Greenwell. “There’s a private members bill in Parliament, the Safer Phones bill, which they watered down to the point of nothing. MPs are listening but the government didn't want to do it. I think a really obvious thing would be to raise the age to 16.”
Jeremy Davis from the Fatherhood Institute pointed out that all this has to be put in context, saying, “Where are boys supposed to go and get off their screens, when cuts have been made to youth clubs and sports groups?” Class comes into this. Poverty. What else is there to do for many boys but get on screens?
You don’t have to be a woke parent to be worried about this stuff. I’d wager that even if your views are that men should be men and feminism is wrong, you still don’t want your child being exposed to extreme content. Left to develop their hearts and minds and bodies in a lawless place away from parental input.
The point the show makes most powerfully, is the need for parental love and attention. Whatever form that takes. Take your boy out boxing if you like, it doesn’t have to be vegan yoga, just so long as the time is spent together. This should go beyond politics. It is a safeguarding issue for all children.
Adolescence is this year’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office, one which demands change.
