Everyone’s talking about the hit Netflix show Adolescence, and for good reason too. Netflix says since the drama launched in March it has amassed 66.3 million views worldwide and has become one of the most talked-about UK series in recent memory.
If you still haven’t seen it, you should, especially if you relate to little boys, and not-so-little boys, and have even the teeniest interest [read concern] as to what is going on in their heads. The show about a 13-year-old boy has sparked conversations globally on how to protect children from harmful stuff on social media, violent misogyny in particular.
I began to watch the series with mixed feelings. The word ‘adolescence’ gives me a cringe feeling as it instantly makes me think about pimples, puberty, new realisations, an awkward and confused discomfort about one’s body. Contrary to my expectations, once I began watching, I couldn’t stop. It is not funny, it is not steamy, it is not full of thrilling action with cars falling off cliffs, yet nothing that I have seen so far about older kids even comes close to this astounding four-episode series created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham. I found it intensely gripping and deeply disturbing.
Philip Barantini the show’s director is being lauded on two accounts. One, for his technical accomplishments as each episode is done in a single take so you can just marvel at the blood and sweat gone into the rehearsals and pre-shooting, and secondly, how he tied the awe-inspiringly realistic script that transpired award-worthy performances.
Imagine being woken up by police officers shattering your morning peace and your door to arrest your 13-year-old son for the murder of a school-girl. What begins with a jolt moves you so deep and hits you so hard, you need to watch other stuff after the series to recover from it and be able to write about it without rationally.
For now, let’s just imagine how devastating it could be if God forbid, this happened to you, shock would be a small word to reflect your feelings. The boy makes innocent pleas, wets his pants and is dragged off, while you think it has to be a terrible mistake. As a viewer, you think, is this a murder mystery? But very soon, you realise that a life has been taken and it is a violent eye-opener.
You have been loving parents, given decent education to who you think is a “smart” kid, but how do you figure out if your boy has been struggling, like so many other kids, or boys, and is being slowly and steadily transformed in the toxic environment around us, that they are entrenched in. As parents, we don’t quite understand this.
He is young, and we are happy that he is discovering life and the world through play and friends and family life that we provide on a day to day basis. However, it is this environment of the recent times that the boy might most likely be trying to navigate. This includes his newly-found masculinity, among other things being proliferated through social media.
Have you even heard of terminology like incel and the red pill [please go google], and that your child could be thrown into challenging adult sexual frameworks way before he has even worked out why and how he is growing body hair, has a broken voice and acne? In Adolesence, Jamie Miller (played by Owen Cooper) is being punished socially for still being a virgin at the age of 13. I can bet those dynamics have not cross the average Pakistani parents’ minds.
Jamie was being who he was — a regular middle-class boy from a loving family where the father is a plumber, the parents love each other, he has a sister and things are fine. Yet these people who loved him to bits couldn’t guess that their boy was fraught by his social media circle, who don’t know him and don’t care about him, but bullied him about violating the “Boy Code,” so that he was silently battling shame and self-loathing.
As opposed to other stories in general, the beauty of Adolescence is that it portrays the perpetrator as the victim instead of Katie who was murdered. Jamie feels he needs to assert his masculinity, so much so that he invents stories of being physically active with girls, he feels ugly, he wants to be liked and in conversations with the psychologist, it becomes painfully clear that his self-worth is being destroyed and his concept of manhood, so early in life, has been damaged by his social media peers, a lot of whom are his schoolmates. Gradually, from the shadowy corners of the internet, his feelings and how they were being treated become visible on his Instagram feed. When Katie rejects him, and publicly humiliates him, his fragile identity collapses entirely, and in murderous rage, he kills her.
The series explores the difficult questions that arise when a 13-year-old boy is accused of the fatal stabbing of a girl in his school — and how big a role did social media interactions, largely impenetrable to parents and teachers might have played? We often come across news and happenings and watch a lot of stuff with a predominant feeling that this only happens to other people. But Jamie’s story belongs to every household and family where there are kids who have social media accounts. Do we know what is happening in their reel lives, which are so intricately woven with their real lives? No, not really. Extreme measures like cutting off their virtual network would result in rebellion and damage them emotionally in the same way as locking them up like prisoners would. What should be done then and can anything be done?
Recently, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer met the makers of Adolescence [filmed in England] at Downing Street to discuss child protection. Starmer's office said he backed an initiative by Netflix to stream the drama series for free to secondary schools across the country, so that as many teens as possible can watch it.
Starmer said it was difficult watching the drama with his 14-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son. But showing the drama widely in schools will “help students better understand the impact of misogyny, dangers of online radicalisation and the importance of healthy relationships", his office said.
“It seems like the whole nation is talking about Adolescence and not just this nation,” Starmer said. “As a dad, I have not found it easy to watch this with children, because it connects with the fears and worries that you have as parents and adults.”
“There isn’t one single policy lever to pull. It’s actually a much bigger problem than that,” he added. “And that’s the devastating effect that the problem of misogyny has on our society.”
Jack Thorne, a co-writer on the show, said the team’s purpose behind the show was exactly to provoke a conversation.
“So to have the opportunity to take this into schools is beyond our expectations,” he said. "We hope it’ll lead to teachers talking to the students, but what we really hope is it’ll lead to students talking amongst themselves.”
Actor Stephen Graham, a co-creator of the drama who stars as the boy's father, has told The Associated Press he wanted the narrative to focus on the seemingly ordinary life of the accused.
He said that the first reaction may be to question the background of the murder suspect and how they were raised.
“But what if it's not the family?” Graham asked. “We’re all maybe accountable. School. Society. Parents. Community.”
The success of Adolescence has come during growing concern over children’s use of smartphones and the easy availability of pornography and extreme misogynistic content on social media pushed by controversial influencers
Post watching Adolescense, my mind has become a can of worms, where each wiggly worm is a question, that remains unanswered. The generational gap has never been wider, because of the reluctance of parents, schools and teachers, more so in Pakistan, to digitally literate themselves, and understand Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok – because that’s what your children are spending hours scrolling.
If the police in the UK are now dealing with more than a million crimes related to violence against women and girls each year, or a fifth of all recorded crime, just think of how much unreported crime must have gone on in our part of the world where toxic masculinity and misogyny is a norm.
The other day, I was at a high-tea with a family of four. While the kids were looking at a flock of birds murmuring in the evening sky, the parents quickly took their phones out to calm their own addictions. I gently reminded them to preach what you practice, because they are otherwise trying to curtail their kids’ screen time. They put away the phones sheepishly.
Adolescence shines a light on the reality that we are hesitant to accept. We are all addicted and we are all responsible for what’s happening to kids through social media. “As parents, we often collude in our own ignorance, allowing a film of Vaseline to smear across our lens of perception when it comes to our children’s digital lives,” says Dr Justin Coulson, an Australian author, psychologist and expert on parenting. “Then what should we do?” says Sadia, from a working class neighbourhood. “Outside is not safe, at least they are safe at home glued to phones.”
While tech companies accumulate historical fortunes as they deny responsibility for the toxic spaces they’ve created, our educational institutions are unable to create cultures that nurture emotional intelligence or emotional safety. Parents are either not able to or not doing the job when it comes to kids and screens and need to be extremely aware of what’s going on in their digital and their physical lives in order to know what choices the kids are making and that they will not create devastating consequences for everyone. Children don’t know how they could hurt themselves through social media.
The show doesn’t offer hope, neither comfort, no reassuring conclusion. It is a kick in the gut, for lack of a better word, that leaves us in discomfort which is precisely where the creators of the show want us to be, to find our own way out of this mess. Because the truth is that as I write this and as you read this, millions of boys are staring at their screens, absorbing the toxins that made a Jamie a killer, from a confused young teenager to a murderer. Boys like Jamie need natural, real time to grow up and learn biological and social concepts of masculinity and its physical and emotional dynamics, and not have to learn through compressed and corrupted digital influences, while the grown ups in the family are busy going about their daily chores, and routines.
Let’s pause and step into their challenging digital world, and talk to our kids more. Tell them about their strengths, how much they are valued and loved for who they truly are and find out what’s happening inside those tousled heads that smell of ice cream, footballs, fries and the last remains of shampoo.