It’s the story every parent of teenagers I know has been watching horrified through their fingers. The Netflix drama Adolescence starts with armed police breaking down an ordinary front door to arrest a 13-year-old boy for murder, in front of his bewildered parents. Though initially it seems there must have been some terrible mistake, Jamie’s Instagram account soon yields clues that all the adults – police, parents and teachers alike – had initially blundered past, oblivious.
Though talk of misogynistic “manosphere” influencers such as Andrew Tate hovers over the storyline, this isn’t really a story of radicalisation. What it skewers is the feeling of growing up very publicly in a world where sending nudes risks them instantly being shared round the class and everyone automatically films playground fights on their phones, and how that intensifies dangerous feelings of shame and rejection in immature minds. Over half of young women now say they’re frightened of their male peers, according to a sad little survey for the Lost Boys project at the Centre for Social Justice thinktank. What’s not always obvious is that beneath their anger, boys are often equally frightened of them.
Asked about it this week by the Labour MP Anneliese Midgley, Keir Starmer said he’d been watching Adolescence with his own teenage children. But what has the prime minister, whose own government balked at a backbench bill banning under-16s from social media barely a fortnight ago, learned from it exactly?
As the mother of a teenage boy, I’m wary and weary of public debates that crudely stereotype them all as either damaged or damaging. The world is still thankfully teeming with funny, friendly, kind and remarkably well-adjusted boys, whose worst crime is their locust-like emptying of fridges and deplorable attitude to the tidying of bedrooms. But where they’re thriving it is sometimes against the odds, and where they’re not it’s often too hard to get help. The former England football manager Gareth Southgate was right to warn this week about the dangers of “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers” moving into the vacuum with their warped ideas of what it is to be a man, but what really can’t be repeated enough was his reassuring message to boys who are struggling that success is often built on mortifying early failures. (Even Harry Kane once got released by Arsenal.)
Southgate’s call for more adult male mentors to step up – whether as teachers or coaches or youth group leaders – in boys’ everyday lives was also helpfully echoed by a newly formed alliance of Labour MPs, pushing for better paternity leave and measures to boost fathers’ role in their children’s lives. (One of the few bright spots in Adolescence is its unexpectedly tender portrayal of fatherhood, from Jamie’s dad trying to support his son through whatever he might have done to the lead detective nudged into rethinking his relationship with his own son.)
Much of this thinking reflects a conversation quietly ongoing for months within the Labour party about what fuelled the rise of the populist right in Britain and in the US, where more than half of gen Z men voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. Add in Prof Becky Francis’s government-commissioned review of the school curriculum – suggesting it isn’t working well enough for kids outside the A-levels-to-university track, who are statistically more likely to be boys – and you have the beginnings perhaps of something giving young men a more secure footing, without penalising women.
But what’s still missing is regulation of the violent and extreme algorithmicallydriven content teenage boys are steeped in, and professional support for families who can sense something going wrong – from early years help with emotional regulation in nursery through to youth clubs, school Send provision and NHS mental health services. For while Netflix’s story of a young murderer erupting completely out of the blue makes for relatable drama, it isn’t perhaps what police most often find themselves facing.
This week a judge sentenced 19-year-old Nicholas Prosper to at least 49 years in prison for murdering his mother, Juliana Falcon, his 13-year-old sister, Giselle, and his 16-year-old brother, Kyle, and for plotting a massacre at his old primary school. Prosper’s parents and teachers had picked up on the fact he seemed withdrawn and overwhelmed by normal social interactions, but he wouldn’t talk to the GP to whom he was referred. Instead he dropped out of his A-levels and spent hours online, fixating on content about school shootings, extreme porn and images of child abuse. He became secretly obsessed with the idea of killing his family and copying the Sandy Hook school massacre, whose perpetrator also shot his mother first; at one stage, Prosper also planned to rape his own sister. Having managed to buy a gun using a forged firearms certificate, Prosper’s plot only went awry when his mother sensed something wrong on the morning of the planned atrocity and challenged him. She and his siblings paid the ultimate price for trying to stop him, but in doing so probably saved countless lives at the school.
His case fits the picture painted by the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism, Jonathan Hall, of a new phenomenon in Britain, involving would-be spree killers with no previous convictions or ideology who seemingly go from 0 to 100 overnight: usually loners, usually boys, heavily online and often neurodivergent, though the latter is a sensitive subject. (Prosper was diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder after the killings, and the judge stressed while that might explain his social difficulties and tendency to fixate, there’s no reason to assume it caused his violence; an assessment suggested he also had psychopathic tendencies.) For all the raging argument about mental health problems being supposedly overdiagnosed in teenagers, Prosper’s case is a reminder that plenty of families struggle with underdiagnosis, or being bounced from pillar to post in search of answers that never come while struggling to cope (in the worst cases) with the risk their own children’s violence poses to them.
But these are also crimes, Hall has said, that wouldn’t happen without the internet because that is “the source of the idea that certain types of violence are the solution” – at least to the already vulnerable. With the new regulatory powers given to Ofcom by the online social harms bill finally kicking in, it’s crucial that the watchdog for once actually bares its teeth and that politicians step in quickly if that doesn’t work. The writers of Adolescence deserve our gratitude for bringing parents and children together on the sofa, giving both an opening to talk honestly about something difficult. But it’s for politicians to finish the job.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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