This week, it seems everyone has been watching Adolescence on Netflix. The four-part series follows 14-year-old Jamie, who is accused of killing his classmate Katie. In the aftermath of the murder, as we watch the investigation unfold, we try to grasp the roots of Jamie’s violence, and learn that he has been deeply impacted by harmful misogynistic messages online.
The programme’s creators, Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, are asking us to pay attention to a real, growing problem.
Anyone who has watched the series this week will no doubt be reflecting (and indeed maybe panicking) about what we can all do to support the children and young people in our lives. It is important to think about some of the key messages from the story, and focus on how we might turn what might feel like somewhat of an overwhelm of grief and/or panic into positive action.
Adolescence does a great job of highlighting the issue of a growing gap in understanding between young people and adults when it comes to our online lives.
As we watch the investigation unfold, the detectives desperately search for some understanding of Jamie’s possible motives. They analyse interactions between Jamie and Katie in Instagram comments - but they only begin to make true sense of these interactions when DI Bascombe’s own teenage son points out that he has been reading the comments wrong; “you’re not getting it”, he pleads before translating and decoding an entire language, a whole world of meaning communicated in emoji symbolism - introducing his dad to the word “manosphere” and explaining the hidden meanings of symbols used by Katie to call Jamie an incel. This changes the meaning of the comment interactions and thus alters the course of the investigation.
On this crucial point about a gap in understanding, we might venture further to suggest that some of the press and discussion emerging around the programme this week has (accidentally) served to prove this point further. A disproportionate focus on ‘influencers’, widely denounced all over the internet this week, perhaps obscures the bigger picture of the world boys are navigating online. Whilst toxic influencers who perpetuate harmful and misogynistic messages should be held accountable, this is not the whole picture of misogyny.
In listening to children involved in Respected and Safe, we are constantly learning about ways children and young people are exposed to misogyny in all kinds of forms online - in memes based on harmful stereotypes and jokes about violence against girls, in gaming chat comments that tell girls to “go back to the kitchen”. Exposure to harmful content like misogyny online can start with small things and can escalate fast; we need to continue to learn about the full picture of these experiences.
It’s probably fair to say that the creators of Adolescence know this; after DI Bascombe learns from his son about the hidden language around incel culture buried in Instagram comments, he explains to DI Frank who reduces all of the potential meanings to an Andrew Tate name drop. Aside from the fact that this name drop name evokes mostly laughter from children now, Andrew Tate does not represent the whole problem.
Even more importantly, we need to look beyond these individuals (the toxic influencers) to hold platforms accountable for the ways that misogyny is pushed to boys and young men, based on algorithms created to perform for maximum profit - by logic that is entirely indiscriminate when it comes to this kind of harm.
No matter what we might assess of this gap in understanding, we must take it as a starting point to close that gap, rather than let it paralyse us with stress.
In a review in The Guardian, Lucy Mangan writes of the series:
We are led into a teenage world that is lived primarily online and which adults are, whatever they might think, incapable of properly monitoring or understanding.
Although Mangan is right to call out complacency in understanding the language and dynamics of young people’s online spaces (demonstrated perhaps by the mention of Andrew Tate in episode 2), it is absolutely critical that we bust the myth that adults are simply ‘incapable’ of better understanding young people’s experiences online.
It is of course natural to feel overwhelmed by the weight of these problems - the urgency of panic sparked by this series tells us that this feeling of overwhelm is very common. However, we cannot afford to be cynical about this; it is never too late to work on closing that gap, and it can start with the smallest of conversations.
We believe this is possible because the challenge of closing this gap is at the heart of our work at CyberSafe. We know that this can start with small conversations, and it depends on an ongoing commitment to raising children’s voices, giving them the space to let us in to their online worlds and really listening to their perspectives.
Adolescence calls us to reflect on how we can support boys’ self-esteem.
The series takes us on the journey of Jamie’s case, and through the investigation we are grasping for some kind of understanding to explain his actions. We want to see him as different to the young boys we know. Instead, we are asked to contend with the fact that Jamie is extremely vulnerable, and make sense of how that vulnerability could possibly have translated into such brutal violence.
Jamie’s self-esteem is extremely low; he tells the psychologist that he is ugly and not good at anything. Through this story, Adolescence points to a kind of male violence that is often born out of vulnerabilities - which emphasises the critical point that lots of this kind of harmful online content, and the algorithms that dictate its direction of travel, feed on vulnerabilities. These are vulnerabilities experienced by growing numbers of boys, that we desperately need to address. Hence, the other important call to action from this story is to work on supporting boys’ self-esteem.
We must also lend focus to girls’ experiences and how we can support them.
Whilst we untangle all of these questions about how best to support boys, and ultimately prevent growing violence, we must acknowledge the experiences of girls who are already suffering that violence, in all its forms. Adolescence highlights this point too; in episode 2, while the detectives investigate at the school, DI Frank explains how much it bothers her that in cases like this, disproportionate emphasis and attention lands on the perpetrator; in the momentous task of unravelling Jamie’s motives, it feels like “Katie isn’t important, Jamie is.” This reminds us to hold space for girls’ experiences in the face of growing violence against them and the evolving landscape of misogyny online. In the worst cases, girls are becoming victims in an epidemic of serious violence. On a wider scale, girls are dealing with the whole picture of misogyny in all kinds of forms, particularly in their online lives.
In practice, particularly for parents, all of this this means:
Firstly, simply engaging and taking an interest in children’s online spaces can be more important than we might think - playing games with them, asking simple questions about what is happening on social media platforms, and being ready to listen to their language to understand a world of dynamics and norms. We need to normalise having more conversations with children about what happens online so that we can be there to support them.
We need to support children to identify and challenge misogyny online. This part will be made much easier by the understanding we’ve built by listening to them. As a society, we critically need to educate and empower children to approach online spaces with the tools to stay safe. On a smaller scale, we can start having conversations about gender-based violence and misogyny, and help to prepare them to spot and move away from the content that is harmful, so that its messages aren’t easily absorbed in the absence of challenging views - in the context of social media echo chambers.
We also need to continually reassure children that we are there to support them, so that if something does go wrong online they know they can reach out for help. This means explicitly telling children that there is nothing that can happen or that they can do online that we will not help them with. So often children face shame around things that happen online which stops them from being able to access support; it is our job to create space for that support.
In general, we need to pay attention to the ongoing task of protecting and building both boys’ and girls’ self-esteem.
In the final scene of Adolescence, the unfathomable grief of Jamie’s parents - as they reflect on the harm their son was exposed to while ‘safe’ in his room - is bound to somewhat overwhelm us. But rather than paralysing us in fear, it should teach us some important lessons and give us a valuable opportunity to reflect on how we can support children and young people to safely navigate their online lives. All of this can start with the most simple conversations, in which children’s experiences are central.
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