‘Adolescence’ wakes us up to the plight of young boys

By Rosa Prince

It’s the TV show everyone in the UK is talking about.

At Prime Minister’s Question Time, Keir Starmer told MPs that along with his teenage son and daughter, he’d joined the millions of Brits watching Adolescence, the four-part Netflix series about a 13-year-old boy who kills a schoolmate.

MPs have called for the show to be screened in parliament, every news program seems to be discussing it and school WhatsApp groups are lit up with anxious messages from parents troubled by what they’ve viewed. And no wonder: The show perfectly captures our current moment, in which society is grappling with what it means to be a boy when the loudest voices defining masculine identity belong to Andrew Tate and Donald Trump.

Last week alone, former England football manager Gareth Southgate used the Dimbleby Lecture to lament the lack of male role models, while a group of MPs launched a new parliamentary group aimed at steering youngsters away from “toxic influencers” and a report by the Higher Education Policy Institute found boys’ underachievement in school led to them missing out on higher education.

The background to all this has been a drumbeat of trials and convictions of boys and young men for sickening crimes — 19-year-old Nicholas Prosper became the latest teen killer in the UK to be sentenced, for murdering three members of his family and plotting a school shooting.

The stats confirm there’s cause for concern. The rate of young men not in education, employment or training is rising three times as steeply as that for their female counterparts, and while the gender gap at exams taken at 16 has narrowed, boys are still 6 per cent less likely to achieve a top grade. Male pupils are also twice as likely to be excluded or suspended.

These are all negatives for the life prospects of young men, but it’s girls who often pay the price. Analysis of police reports by the Observer in November showed a 40 per cent increase in rapes in which both victim and perpetrators were under-18, with an alarming 81 per cent increase in attacks on school property. According to the NSPCC, 52 per cent of offenders are juveniles, leading the National Police Chiefs’ Council to call on social media firms to do more to stop teens accessing misogynistic content online. As in Adolescence, warped perceptions of what’s appropriate in a teenage relationship can spiral into criminality.

I was a little late to Adolescence because, having broadly picked up the storyline (young boy, corrupted by his smart phone, turns killer), it felt too depressing for evening entertainment. But I crumbled after nearly everyone I knew asked if I’d seen it. Having binge-watched the show in one sitting, I can confirm that in many ways it’s an extraordinary piece of art — its signature single-shot episodes alone justify the hype that saw it become Netflix’s top show in its first week.

The murder plot line is something of a red herring — such crimes do happen, and Adolescence draws on some of these appalling tragedies, but they are markedly rare in the UK. What’s more interesting is the show offers a jumping off point to explore some deeper and just as troubling themes: inadequate schools and teaching, the lack of positive male role models in society, absentee fathers, sexual abuse of and by children, anger issues, extreme pornography, bullying and, yes, toxic masculinity, violence against women and knife crime. Some of these are new, others are as old as childhood itself, but all are amplified by social media and the inability of teens to switch off from their devices.

As the debate intensifies about how to stop boys from turning into teenage monsters, campaigners are calling on Starmer to appoint a “minister for men and boys,” to sit alongside the women and equalities brief in his government — a demand the prime minister has rejected, although he did vow to take on the “challenge” of the identity crisis facing boys and young men, adding: “We can’t shrug our shoulders at it.”

The PM is right that this is something we need to get a grip on — and the answer is not yet another minister. But identifying exactly what we should do is hard; the problems facing young boys today seem so insidious and interconnected it’s difficult to know where to begin. The most common reaction to the show from the mums and dads at our school gate was a sense of powerlessness and even despair. That’s understandable, because there are no simple answers.

When it comes to kids’ online behaviour, schools at least are starting to be more proactive. Guidance issued in November encourages headteachers to banish phones from the classroom. And many parents have gotten involved in the “delay smartphones” movement, the campaign encouraging families to think twice about buying phones for young children, which can allay the peer pressure that makes kids want a device. Of course, there’s no magic age after which it’s somehow safe for kids to be online — and the genie is already out of the bottle. Government statistics show that 97 per cent of 12-year-olds have a phone.

Meanwhile, the Conservative peer Gabby Bertin has campaigned for online pornography to be subject to the same rules as that in the “real” world, so that boys do not fall into the trap of thinking the extreme portrayal of sex increasingly seen on the internet is how they should approach actual relationships. Platforms should know they face prosecution if they publish the most extreme content, just as a magazine publisher would in the “real” world.

There are other ways we can help our boys to grow into men of substance, but none of this is easy. Local authorities struggling to manage budgets are increasingly cutting youth services, depriving boys of the sports coaches who could have been their role models. That’s shortsighted when knife crime and bullying among teens are so notoriously pernicious and hard to root out — and the price tag for wider society is far greater than the bill for keeping a youth club open.

And it’s not just about money. It may seem obvious, but we need to watch what we’re doing and saying at home. The best way to combat the garbage spewing from Tate and other heroes of the utterly weird and insidious incel culture is for men and women to model healthy relationships.

There may be no single, easy-fix solution to the problems highlighted by Adolescence — they’ve crept up on us in recent years, and we can’t turn back the clock. But having the debate is a start.