Netflix’s gripping new drama, Adolescence, observes the terrifying reality of the manosphere's influence on teenage boys – focusing in on one horrifying case.
When a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, is accused of stabbing his female classmate to death, police, parents and educators search for answers in the wake of this shocking tragedy. Over the course of four episodes, each filmed in one continuous shot, Adolescence raises critical questions about incel culture, male violence and the pressures of social media.
According to the United Nations, an estimated 736 million women — almost one in three — have been subjected to violence, physical and/or sexual, or both, at least once in their lifetime. With that information in mind, Adolescence’s creators, Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, hope the show can be implemented as an educational tool.
“I want it to be shown in schools, I want it to be shown in Parliament. It’s crucial because this is only going to get worse,” Thorne told the BBC. “It’s something that people need to be talking about – hopefully, that’s what drama can do.”
And the show has certainly come during a particularly prescient time; with the rise of controversial figures such as Andrew Tate, as well as an uptick of gendered violence and the rollback of women's rights across the world, there is now greater concern about how young boys are being radicalised online.
“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?’” Graham told Netflix. “And the pressures that come from all of those things are as difficult for kids here as they are the world over.”
It's little wonder, then, that Adolescence has had universal impact since it was released on Netflix; the drama clocked up a staggering 24.3 million views worldwide in just four days after it was released, and has hit the top of the streamer's charts in several countries.
What happens in Adolescence?
The series opens with police breaking down the door to Jamie Miller’s home, a 13-year-old boy who is arrested for the death of his classmate, Katie. Jamie insists he’s “done nothing wrong”, but as the episode concludes, security footage from the school shows that he murdered Katie in a frenzied knife attack.
As investigators look into the school and the events leading up to the horrific incident, they uncover social media exchanges between Jamie and Katie; he tried to ask her out after a photo of her topless was sent to classmates via Snapchat, appearing to do so to help her feel better. His reasoning is chilling: “I just thought that she might be weak,” Jamie says. “I thought when she was that weak, she might like me.”
But she rejects him and proceeds to send him messages on Instagram with emojis accusing him of being an “incel” or involuntary celibate, referring to an online subculture of men who are angry at women for not having sex with them. Jamie admits to seeing value in Andrew Tate’s “80-20 thing,” as he calls it, the idea that “80 per cent of women are attracted to 20 per cent of men”.
“This is a show about a kid who does the wrong thing and causes great harm. To understand him, we have to understand the pressures upon him,” Graham continued to the BBC. “Jamie has been polluted by ideas that he’s heard online, that make sense to him, that have a logic that’s attractive to him, that answer the questions as to his loneliness and isolation, and lead him to make some very bad choices. We have to understand the things he’s been consuming and that means especially looking at the Internet, the 'manosphere', and incel culture.”
Is Adolescence a true story?
While Jamie’s story told in Adolescence isn’t based on a single incident, it does draw influence from a handful of real-life reports of young boys involved in knife crimes. In the UK in March 2023, there were almost 18,500 cautions and convictions made for possession of a knife, and 17.3 per cent of those offenders were between the ages of 10 and 17, per the House of Commons library.
“It shocked me. I was thinking, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What’s the inciting incident here?’ And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again. I really just wanted to shine a light on it, and ask, ‘Why is this happening today? What’s going on? How have we come to this?’” Graham told Netflix’s Tudum.
“We could have made a drama about gangs and knife crime, or about a kid whose mother is an alcoholic or whose father is a violent abuser,” he continued. “Instead, we wanted you to look at this family and think, ‘My God. This could be happening to us,’ and what’s happening here is an ordinary family’s worst nightmare.’”
There have certainly been a significant number of high-profile cases where women and young girls have been killed after 'rejecting' boys or men. Back in 2021, Jake Davison carried out a mass shooting in Portsmouth, where the 22-year-old killed five people. He previously demonstrated an affinity with the incel community and had expressed nihilistic views online.
In Hexham, 15-year-old Holly Newton was stabbed repeatedly by a then-16-year-old boy who she alleged was “stalking” her, the BBC reported. In 2023, The Independent reported that a 17-year-old girl was stabbed to death in south London after she “refused flowers from a boy” as she and her friends made their way to school.
Elsewhere, the UK was left reeling when 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana murdered Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven; Bebe King, six; and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine in Southport, as well as injuring several other young children who were attending a Taylor Swift dance class. Huge amounts of misinformation and disinformation was shared online, resulting in attacks on asylum seekers and riots across the UK following the murders.
Kyle Clifford, 26, was sentenced to three whole life orders after raping and murdering ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, 25. He also murdered her sister Hannah Hunt, 28, and their mother Carol, 61, in an attack. Courts heard that Clifford, who will never be released from prison, engaged with content by Andrew Tate before committing the attacks.
The timing of Adolescence is certainly poignant, coinciding with the rise of the “manosphere” and the radicalisation of young men and boys by figures like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. “[This] could happen to anyone and that’s not saying anyone is capable of being Jamie,” Thorne told the BBC. “It’s about parents that didn't see him, a school system that let him down, and the ideas that he consumed.”
