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It’s all anybody’s talking about this week: the new Netflix show from Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne.
Directed by Philip Barantini, Adolescence tells the story of Jamie (Owen Cooper), a 13-year-old boy who is arrested for the murder of his classmate. Graham plays his father, Eddie, and as the show progresses, we see the fallout of Jamie’s actions play out on his family, on the police investigating the case and even on Jamie’s psychologist Briony (Erin Doherty).
It’s garnered rave reviews for its exploration of incel culture and male rage – but is Jamie’s story a true one?
Well, kind of. The story of Jamie specifically – and of his family – is fictional. However, in various interviews, Graham has stated that he drew inspiration from several real-life cases where boys had stabbed and killed their classmates.
“We’d been asked to create a one-shot piece which was going to be a series, so we were coming up with the possibilities of what we’d make it about, and I’d read an article in the paper about a young boy stabbing a young girl,” Graham said of his decision to create the show – which he did with writer Jack Thorne.
“It made me feel a bit cold. Then about three or four months later, there was a piece on the news about a young boy who’d stabbed a young girl. They are young boys, they’re not men.”
He later told Tudum, Netflix’s media site, that his aim was to “shine a spotlight” on these boys’ behaviour, and especially on the radical online forums where many of them are radicalised – not just Andrew Tate, but incel culture more generally.
“One of our aims was to ask, ‘What is happening to our young men these days, and what are the pressures they face from their peers, from the internet, and from social media?’” he added. “And the pressures that come from all of those things are as difficult for kids here as they are the world over.”
Graham also wanted to make Jamie’s background as loving as possible – to make it clear just how insidious online narratives could be in warping the attitudes of young boys.
“Without being disrespectful, when these things are on the news – and we’re a couple of kids from council estates – but when these things are on the news, your judgement instantly goes to blaming the family, you blame the mum and dad,” he said at a Next on Netflix event in January.
“We’re all guilty of it, because that's the easy common denominator. I just thought, ‘What if that's not the case at all?’”
The cases Graham cited, of young boys attacking their classmates, are sadly not that unusual, either.
According to the Office for National Statistics, knife attacks in England and Wales have doubled over the past decade – and in March 2023 the Ministry of Justice reported that it had cautioned or convicted people of more than 18,000 knife-related crimes over the course of one year.
Even more worryingly, the perpetrators are young: 17.3 per cent of those offenders were aged between 10 and 17.
Incel culture is on the rise in the UK. The word itself is a mashup of the terms “involuntary celibate” – in other words, men who say that they want a relationship but believe women aren’t attracted to them, or that they’re too ugly for others to find them attractive.
Though the belief goes back 30-odd years, incel culture has morphed over the decades and has become significantly more violent and misogynistic in recent years. In some forums, men write about the fact that they feel entitled to sex – or that violence against women is an acceptable form of revenge.
This attitude has penetrated the classroom, too. According to a 2023 YouGov survey, one in six boys aged six to 15 have a positive view of Andrew Tate – while in May 2022, the Department for Education said there had been a “significant increase” in teachers reporting their pupils to the counter-terrorism scheme Prevent.
This was for “mixed or unclear ideologies” that included “inceldom” – and referrals increased from 193 in 2016-17, to 1,071 in 2019-20.
Adolescence is streaming now on Netflix
