It’s easy to see it as a call to take smartphones off teenagers. But Adolescence is not actually a show about the evilsof the internet leading to a 13-year-old boy murdering a female schoolmate. It is about much more than that.
When horrific violent crimes happen it is human nature to look for a target to blame. With a murder of course that is easy. But Adolescence makes it much more complex than just identifying a monster. That is what makes it feel so real.
Mental health professionals talk about vulnerabilities - the accumulation of individual, family and cultural factors that come together to create individual struggles. The writers of Adolescence lay out a thoroughly believable set of vulnerabilities, and to simply see technology as the villain is to misunderstand the messy nuance that plays out.
On screen, Jamie turns to the internet for connection and affirmation. His family loves him, but he feels unable to be a man in ways that garner his father’s admiration.
As a young boy he liked art and drawing and yet his father is a physical man, who turns away from his son’s mistakes on the football field. His father carries his own trauma and rage. Beaten viciously by his own father as a child, he swears to never do the same to his own son, yet in controlling himself he also turns away from his son, his rage flowing over in other areas of his life.
There is no doubt he loves Jamie, but he doesn’t know how to love him safely, and so in subtle ways he keeps his distance.
So is it his dad’s fault? His mother works hard to regulate and keep his father calm. In doing so she models a power dynamic that is common in patriarchal families, it is the women’s role to keep their men calm, through their emotional intelligence that is culturally mandated in ways male emotions aren’t.
This is highlighted when Jamie’s sister rolls her eyes at her mother when discussing her boyfriend, and proclaims, “I don’t need him to look after me Mum.”
So is it his parents’ fault?
Well, this is a family living in working class England, where Jaime’s father works on-call as a plumber. So his own issues aside, financial pressures take him away from the family. His parents, naive about technology and glad that their son has an interest, buy him a computer which he has in his room.
At school Jamie is spat on and singled out - in a school system that struggles to keep children in class, with inexperienced teachers turning on TVs to teach and with little time to attend to those who may need pastoral care.
Jamie’s victim Katie, herself new to the school and struggling to find her place, sends a topless photo of herself in an effort to connect with a boy. After the photo is spread around school by the recipient, she lashes out at Jamie’s efforts to connect with her (while she is “weak” in his words) and she taunts Jaime online.
Of course the school has no resources to respond to any of this - with the exception of the one teacher who tries to help Katie’s friend Jade, but is only able to suggest once more referring her on to mental health services.
The Netflix drama Adolescence, starring Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty, canvasses a 13-year-old boy charged with murdering a female classmate.
Can we blame the schools, the mental health system, or wider society then?
Is the real problem that Jamie is an “incel” (involuntary celibate)?
All of these factors, lack of affirmation, feeling weak and unacceptable to his father, loneliness and lack of connection in a family understandably too busy to notice he has turned to his computer in the privacy of his own room is ultimately Katie’s demise.
The majority of young people consume some form of online content, yet the world is not filled with Jamies. In the same way that every young person who is handed a smartphone doesn’t go on to murder a classmate, or develop a mental illness, not every person who picks up a drink, or smokes a joint goes on to become an addict.
Banning smartphones or social media is likely to be as successful as banning drugs - even age limits have their, well, limits. When we blame “technology”, we also wash our hands as a society of responsibility.
Responsibility for a society that has created work hours that take parents away, a school system under-resourced and focused on achievement at the cost of caring and relationship, of a world that fails to protect young men and women at a time in their development when it can seem like they don’t need us anymore, but in fact need us more than ever.
Just as Jamie’s parents painfully wrestle with their own responsibility - “we made him”, they sob, we too must take all the responsibility that is ours. As parents we must educate ourselves, and make a clear-eyed assessment - with the help of trusted friends or other parents - as to the vulnerabilities our children bring to their engagement with the online world.
We should at the very least be following the age limits of the platforms themselves, and taking the time to fully engage with the parental controls that exist for devices and platforms. Coming together as communities of parents can also help shape shared norms.
Legislated age limits, bans on use in schools, and public education in schools - are all measures that make sense to me, but also in reality have their limits - we only need look at adolescent drinking and drug use to see that.
But the one thing that we need to do is maintain good close, open and loving relationships and connections with our children, even when they start to actively avoid that as adolescence kicks in. One of the strongest results in the literature is in the protective value of close family relationships and strong communities.
So who’s to blame? All of us. And until we all take community responsibility for a world that creates Jamies then nothing will change, in fact it will only get worse.
