So Netflix drama Adolescence is being passed out to schools, but will it raise the right questions?

This week UK prime minister Keir Starmer announced that he’s backing a move to show the controversial Netflix mini-series Adolescence for free in school classrooms across the UK. His comments were clearly driven by the huge debate and public discussion that has followed the screening of the series, which centres on a 13-year-old schoolboy named Jamie Miller who is arrested for the murder of a girl in his school.

The series was an instant hit, clocking up more than 96 million views on the Netflix platform, placing it ninth on Netflix’s all-time viewership list and initial reactions were euphoric – The Guardian’s lucy Mangan called it “the closest thing to TV perfection in decades”, Empire film magazine said it was “the most dizzying TV feat of the year”, and Adolescence became the first internet streaming show to grab top place in the influential Barb Audiences weekly TV ratings.

The series also gripped the popular narrative on most social media channels, as parents and commentators latched onto the key themes explode in the script. In an interview with the Radio Times, co-writer Stephen Graham admitted that the impetus for writing came from two incidents.

“Where it came from, for me, is there was an incident in Liverpool, a young girl, and she was stabbed to death by a young boy. I just thought, why?,” said Graham. “Then there was another young girl in South London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop.”

This was the tragic death of schoolgirl Elianne Andam, 15, who killed after she got off a bus outside the Whitgift Centre on her way to Old Palace of John Whitgift School in Croydon on September 27, 2023. She was stabbed repeatedly with a kitchen knife by 18 year old Hassan Sentamu following an argument about returning a teddy bear that Hassan had given to an ex-girlfriend.

Sentamu was sentenced to a minimum of 23 years in prison, and during sentencing Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb made particular reference to Sentamu’s signs of ‘Conduct Disorder’ as a child, and all involved in the Netflix production have expressed their hope that the drama series will challenge perceptions on the problems of ‘incel culture’ and ‘toxic masculinity’.

Incel, which is short for ‘involuntary celibate’, generally refers to any male who has developed a hostile attitude to women due to being unable to attract a sexual or romantic partner. Toxic masculinity is somewhat harder to define, but broadly it is used to refer to excessively masculine behaviour that is harmful, suppressive or impacts negatively on society or women in particular.

These two terms have gained wide acceptance and have become increasingly politicised, especially in the wake of increasing social distrubances on our streets, and the many undercurrents that may or may not be affecting or influencing the bahavoiur of young males in particular.

It’s a narrative that suits some very well, as it focusses all the burden of negative outcomes on the subject, but says precious little about the wider societal circumstances that lead to such behaviours evolving in the first place.

“You look at it and you see that we’re kind of all accountable to an extent,” Graham told Sky News this week.

“There’s failings within the school system, there’s situations where the education system can look at this, look at what’s happened with that kind of rise in these misogynistic tendencies.”

It is no doubt with this in mind that Kier Starmer has stepped in to try and grasp at the public narrative and declare his backing for the widespread showing of Adolescence across schools, along with various linked educational resources that have been produced especially to support the initiative.

“As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard. We all need to be having these conversations more,” said Starmer on his X feed on Monday. That’s all very well, but Mr Starmer has repeatedly been referring to Adolescence as a ‘documentary’ when it’s nothing of the sort, it’s a purely fictional drama and isn’t in any way, shape or form an educational resource. Some have even pointed out that there are quite fundamental and ideological flaws in the drama, which portrays an extreme example of ‘toxic masculinity’ that few young boys will identify with. It could even be argued that Adolescence takes a particularly negative and damaging view of boyhood that lays the blame for a far more serious social disconnect at the feet of young men.

As the prime minister himself commented: “We may have a problem with boys and young men that we need to address.”

Sweeping – and hugely inaccurate – statements like this can easily do far more damage than good, especially if schools are being steered towards presenting narratives that present all young men as representing a potential threat to the social order. Not only is this a profound disservice to the many, but it conveniently ignores the real issues and dangers that do in fact lead some impressionable young people into negative behaviours.

All of that said, I think we also need to challenge the very premises on which these narratives are founded. Take ‘incel’ for instance; there are massive presumptions being made here, the very definition of ‘involuntary celibacy’ is not a universally accepted ‘problem’. From a Christian perspective in particular, the root of the problem of negative attitudes to women based on a supposed inability to secure a sexual partner has far more to do with society’s unreasonable and misguided liberal expectations than it does with any young man’s reactions to failure in this particular endeavour.

Equally, ‘toxic masculinity’ has become a widely accepted phrase, and most of us will be familiar with the kinds of unacceptable behaviour that sees others being demeaned, oppressed or treated abusively. This however is a human behaviour and if society is determined to talk about ‘toxic masculinity’ as a social phenomenon than there ought to be parallel narrative about ‘toxic femininity’, which is also becoming increasingly evident within societal interactions and has its own culpability in contributing to modern day desocialisation.

Legislators and social engineers are invariably attracted to the blame game in an effort to dismiss and deflect for the blatantly obvious problems that blight contemporary society. This is generally because more often than not public disorder is the result of unreasonable and ill-conceived impositions placed on a public that is generally more than capable of running its own affairs in a humane and charitable manner.

When he was interviewed this week about the thinking behind Adolescence,  co-writer Jack Thorne was clear that the drama’s main subject, Jamie, was not a simple product of what people love to call the ‘manosphere’.

“He is a product of parents that didn’t see, a school that couldn’t care and a brain that didn’t stop him,” said Thorne.

“Put 3,000 kids in the same situation and they wouldn’t do what he did. Yet spend any time on forums on 4chan or Reddit, spend any time on most social media platforms and you end up, quite quickly, in some dark spaces. Parents can try to regulate this, schools can stop mobile phone access but more needs to be done.”

Really you just have to ask yourself some very simple questions: who or what institutions have been responsible for the very ‘toxic’ manipulation and demolition of sexual and moral boundaries over the past half century; who or what institutions have been responsible for the complete failure to regulate social media and the internet since it launched in 1995, who or what institutions have been responsible for the eradication of the concept of the family and family value; who or what institutions have been responsible for the complete failure to uphold and maintain the social order generally? The list goes on … and the blame goes on.

After the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s overturned centuries of an established social and moral order, the world hung heavy with promises of a utopian new age of Aquarius. What actually emerged was a reiteration of old conformities disguised as personal, sexual and ideological liberations, and the public swallowed the illusion hook, line and sinker. Sexual liberation – delivered by the giant, male dominated corporations who turned to manufacturing contraception – has given us untold social dysfunctionality and a range of very unpleasant diseases; equality and employment rights has thrown the female population into the very same wage slavery that men were desperate to escape from, and uncontrolled free market capitalism has created a chasm between the outrageously rich and the desperate poor.

To make matters worse, there has been a concerted effort to push these failures of social engineering into the previously cherished realm of childhood, whilst at the same time pushing our children relentlessly towards this highly distorted construct of modern adulthood.

No doubt many schools across the country will engage with the Adolescence fictional drama mini-series, and that’s no bad thing; I just hope that teachers and parents will heed the intentions and concerns of the writers, and invite their pupils not only to discuss the programme’s narrative, but also to explore and explain some of the real reasons why so many of our young people today – both male and female – are feeling so profoundly marginalised, pressured and devalued by their peers. Perhaps then we adults might understand far better the manifestations of disorder and delinquency that some young people feel driven to.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and public theologian