The Netflix series Adolescence has galvanised the nation more viscerally than any TV drama since Cathy Come Home highlighted the family-shattering impact of homelessness. Just like Cathy Come Home did in the mid-1960s, Adolescence has already prompted questions in Parliament. Its subject matter is an altogether newer scourge: the radicalisation online of teenage boys leading to them committing savage acts of violence, especially against girls.
The central character in Adolescence is a 13-year-old boy growing up in a normal, loving family. His parents are unable to comprehend his arrest – by an armed police unit – on suspicion of murder. The quality of the script and the acting – especially from Stephen Graham as the everyman father Eddie Miller and Owen Cooper as his son Jamie – have ensured it has brought millions of viewers up short. Many parents have found themselves thinking afresh about what their children are watching and reading online.
The Prime Minister revealed his family have made time to watch the series. Keir Starmer told MPs this week: “At home we are watching Adolescence.
“I’ve got a 16-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl, and it’s a very good drama to watch. The violence carried out by young men, influenced by what they see online, is a real problem. It’s abhorrent and we have to tackle it.”
On the political right, some have complained about how the perpetrator of the violence in the series is shown to be an apparently meek white boy, whereas two of the most notorious recent cases of teenagers murdering girls – Axel Rudakubana in Southport and Hassan Sentamu in Croydon – concerned black youths with a history of threatening others with knives.
Yet nobody should doubt that teenage boys from all backgrounds are vulnerable to feelings that they are being turned into pariahs by society. Online algorithms frequently throw ever-more extreme content at them which magnifies and intensifies this world view.
The internet was supposed to open out the whole world of human knowledge to all of us at the touch of a button. All too often it has done the opposite, actively feeding us with material to reinforce our existing prejudices.
One phrase cropping up in debate about Adolescence is “toxic masculinity”, usually aimed at online “influencers” such as Andrew Tate with his ideology about men needing to dominate the females in their lives.
The crossbow killer Kyle Clifford, a grown man in his mid-20s, watched videos by Tate just before he went on his sadistic murder spree, a fact confirmed by Mr Justice Bennathan who presided over Clifford’s trial.
There can be little dispute that the attitudes spread by Tate and his imitators fully merit the “toxic” epithet. But we should be asking ourselves how such extreme and primitive views are gaining traction among male youths. And one doesn’t have to look far for a possible explanation.
Put simply, we live in an age where traditional male virtues have been marginalised and where many aspects of life have been redesigned to make things more difficult for ordinary “lads”.
These range from a benefits system and social attitudes which undermine the traditional two-parent family, to the near disappearance of men as classroom teachers, to the redesigning of the qualifications system to prioritise coursework over exams, to de-industrialisation removing jobs that require brawn as well as brain.
Available data has been telling us for ages that the old scourge of girls being held back at school and in the workplace has been corrected and that the emerging problem is the under-achievement of boys. It was way back in the 1980s that girls started outperforming boys at school.
This trend is now accelerating. Since the pandemic, the number of males aged 16-24 not in education, employment or training has soared by 40% (the female figure is up just 7%). Men in their twenties now on average earn less than their female peers – a new gender pay gap we hear little about. Yet no government has devised a strategy for channelling help towards our “lost boys”.
Instead, the priority remains feminisation of occupations which traditionally suited male attributes. Physical requirements for policing, firefighting and the forces have been relaxed to ensure more opportunities for females.
Educational leaders remain obsessed with the shrinking areas of female under-representation, rather than addressing the collapse in attainment by young men.
The suspicion must be that this is because of an unshakeable belief by those in authority that “male privilege” and especially “white male privilege” must always be counteracted.
Many is the teen boy who bridles at this official narrative and becomes as a result potential fodder for Tate and co. It is good that Adolescence has shone a light on toxic masculinity.
But political leaders need to outline a notion of noble masculinity and provide far more opportunities for our sons to tread that path.
