The battle of Adolescence

Like many other people, I’m just coming back down from Take Mountain, where the pundits were all debating the drama Adolescence and explaining what it really told us about ourselves. Nor was it just a British thing – I was in Liguria last weekend and the Saturday edition of La Repubblica featured a big inside article on the fictional case of 13-year-old Jamie Miller. By the time I arrived home on Sunday evening, the prime minister had scheduled a special meeting with the show’s producers to discuss… actually I’m not entirely sure what they were supposed to discuss, but it seemed to end up with an agreement that Adolescence could be streamed free into schools.

Keir Starmer posted this on X: “As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard. We all need to be having these conversations more.” But which conversations were those? Britain’s “toughest head” Katharine Birbalsingh thought the time for conversation was over and characteristically chided the PM for not knowing what she had known all along. “You find Adolescence shocking,” she told the father of two, “because you aren’t in kids’ online worlds. Kids already know this is happening. Getting kids to watch Adolescence will make zero difference. What you need to do as PM is ban phones to under-16s.” Birbalsingh may be Britain’s toughest head, and her school may well be brilliant, but if her social media persona is anything to go by she is also comfortably Britain’s most arrogant head.

She represented that part of the Adolescence-respondents who were sure that the problem highlighted by the drama was that of children’s access to social media via smartphones. Take them away and no one underage will be murdering anyone else, or texting each other encoded bullying emojis, as carefully explained to the fictional detective by his schoolboy son.

The access of young people to terrible content was a second focus of concern. The dread question was, who even knows what they are looking at? One moment it could be Minecraft and the next it might be How to Use a Zombie Knife. Which naturally makes policing the internet the main issue arising out of Adolescence.

But wait a moment, this was about a boy killing a girl. Laurie Penny in the New Statesman had no doubt that misogyny was the big problem the drama was highlighting. Every year dozens of women are murdered by their male partners (or even their sons), thousands more physically abused and sexually assaulted.

This male violence was so ubiquitous, she implied, that was it any surprise that Jamie should be radicalised by the manosphere to the point of killing? And indeed the name “Andrew Tate” and the concept of the incel was invoked by the writers, though the fictional police officer’s scepticism about a 13-year-old seeing himself as an incel seemed justified
to me.

No, said Douglas Murray in the Sun, indignant that the killer was a white boy when most teenaged killers are Black, but (he demanded) would you ever get the woke dramarati to make a series about that? That was what he took away from it all. Private Eye rather unkindly pointed out that there have been several such dramas, to which I can add that there is no sign that Murray ever wrote about any of them.

Yet others saw in Adolescence a story of the crisis in masculinity or in boyhood, which is a fashionable (and real) concern, but which might have been better illustrated through seeing how boys performed in school compared to the girls, and by them talking about their aspirations. Hard to make a drama out of that, I suppose.

Contraindications

Back from Italy, I heard a radio discussion about Adolescence in which one of the participants bemoaned the results of a poll showing that 30-odd% of teenagers would not or could not name a role model. This was supposed to be alarming, but I am reasonably sure that had you asked me the same question at the same age I would have failed in the role-model naming department too. 

In any case, the same question is asked perennially with much the same result – as in 2018 when 25% had no role model and 2009 when the problem was no male role model for boys in one-parent families or boys in junior schools with no male teachers. 2% of nursery workers were then male.

The thought easily occurs to me that the kids of America, having watched their parents elect the entirely amoral Donald Trump as president for the second time, may wonder what their seniors see as a “good person”. As they also might across the globe when watching the amount of time their parents spend on their phones, before being told that at all costs they shouldn’t emulate this behaviour. It comes back to me that in the idyllic days before mobile phones, there was no way at weekends that my parents knew where their 15-year-old son even was, let alone what I was looking at. So, might we better look at what is on the phones rather than ban the phones altogether?

And never mind emojis, the world of the adolescent was just as much a terrifying mystery to my mother as it is to today’s mums and dads. There was the time, for example, that Mrs Aaronovitch took a snuff box that I had been given by a friend to a chemist for analysis to see what kind of drug was in it. Long hair and a liking for Jimi Hendrix was more than enough to convince the adult world that your next stop was an acid drop. So it hasn’t been much of a surprise to discover that insofar as Andrew Tate is still a thing for teenage boys, it’s down to the fast cars and easy money rather than the rape fantasies.

Back in the real world

That’s not the way Michael Hogan in the Guardian saw it, beginning a piece with this:

“The arrival of searing new series Adolescence could hardly be more timely. The drama dropped on Netflix just as it emerged that crossbow killer Kyle Clifford had searched online for misogynistic podcasts and watched Andrew Tate videos hours before murdering three female members of the Hunt family.”

But Clifford was 26. And if the Tate videos are suggestive, then what do we make of the fact that in 2018 his brother Bradley Clifford was convicted of murder? Two riders on a moped damaged the wing-mirror on his Ford Mustang, so he drove at them at high speed, knocked them off their bike, and while one lay dying in the road, Clifford kicked and punched him. No internet perusing in that one – just murderous rage. In other words, this link was a stretch.

I thought that one of the great virtues of Adolescence was that each of its four episodes hinted at a different element making up the possible causes of Jamie’s crime. 

The last one (to my mind the most convincing of all) showed a family in thrall to the anger of their perfectly good, loving dad – an anger partly created by his own violent father. The way Jamie’s mother suppressed her own feelings for fear of further upsetting her husband felt real to me. But murder?

Online Yahoo News, however, offered this precis: “Many viewers have reacted to the horrific nature of the show’s subject matter – but in reality, a large number of teenagers have been convicted of similar crimes across the UK.”

No, they haven’t. In fact the murder of a girl under 16 by a boy under 16 is vanishingly rare. In the year ending March 2024 there were 570 murders in England and Wales, a 3% reduction on the previous year. Of the victims, 414 were male, 156 were female. Black people were four times more likely to be victims than Whites.

One hundred and five victims were aged 16-24, compared to 103 for the 25 to 44-year-old age group – the proportion was much higher for Black victims. 33% of victims were known drug users, 16% were drug dealers. 32% of suspects were under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the homicide.

The effects of violent misogyny – a constant over the years and not a result of the Tate period – are clearly apparent in the statistics. 60% of all adult female victims were domestic homicides, and of the 83 “domestic” murders only six were committed by women.

So what about the under-16s, the age bracket including both Jamie and his victim? In that year 2023-24 there were 44 homicides. Twenty-six of the victims were boys and 18 were girls.

Before I make what should be the obvious point about murders of children in this age group, a word on the most notorious teenaged murderers of under-16 girls. Hassan Sentamu – who was cited by Adolescence’s Stephen Graham as a case that helped inspire him to make the series – was 17 when he stabbed 15-year-old Elianne Andam to death in Croydon in broad daylight. Sentamu apparently felt humiliated by Andam.

But there is no similarity between Sentamu and Jamie. There was no evidence of online influence, Sentamu came from a disastrous family background, including being forced to stay in a boarding school in Uganda for three months where he was beaten with a metal pole. When he arrived back in Britain he was described as “changed”, became withdrawn and began to talk about suicide.

According to a BBC report of his sentencing, he was given a police caution at the age of 12 after producing a knife in school, had placed girls in a headlock and threatened to cut the tail off his foster carer’s cat. If there are parallels here, they are to the case of Axel Rudukubana, the Southport killer.

Then there was Logan MacPhail, who was 16 when he murdered his 15-year-old ex-girlfriend Holly Newton in Hexham, Northumberland, in January 2023. MacPhail, who attended much of the trial from secure accommodation due to learning difficulties, had been a controlling boyfriend, who stalked Holly before the murder. Once again there was no suggestion of an online influence.

One thing though does bind together all these juvenile murders, juvenile and real; knives were used in all of them, as they were in 41% of homicides in England and Wales. What is unknowable is whether, had knives not been available, the killers wouldn’t have used something else.

So back to the under-16 victims of murders and the obvious point. The most at-risk group of all are babies and in 43% of all cases the suspect was a parent or step-parent.

Which brings us to…

For some reason, Disney has made a “live-action” remake of Snow White, which beats Adolescence for realism in that it features a murderous step-parent, but otherwise seems to be its inferior in all departments.

The row about Snow White, though is as revealing in its own way as the discussion about Adolescence has been, with proxy wars being fiercely fought by culture wars partisans. Snow White herself is played by a celebrated mixed-ethnicity actor called Rachel Zegler, which apparently dismayed purists who presumably would have preferred the ivory-skinned Tilda Swinton. 

The movie is apparently punctuated by the kind of messages that are currently being edited out of the Smithsonian museums and even the Washington zoo by JD Vance. The editor of the conservative website the Daily Wire, who goes by the almost unimprovable name of Jeremy Danial Boreing, said of the movie that it would “expose children to the popular but destructive lies of the current moment”.

I have only seen the trailers, but those lies would seem to include rabbits that can open doors, mirrors that can talk, sexually continent princes and absolute monarchies that are kind to their peoples. Had the complaint been clunky, didactic, wit-free dialogue and filming so saccharine that it makes you feel more nauseous than a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, then that would seem to be fair.

But folded into the inevitable complaints about wokeness (this Snow White apparently lets the seven small persons clean their own hovel), is an aggressive nostalgia – and into its defence an equally aggressive and philistine ignorance of the past.

The nostalgic seem to think it’s a culture crime to alter anything that they have loved to take account of things changing, But I’ve now sat through the rather wonderful 1953 Disney Peter Pan twice with three-year-old Alma and, frankly, the sexism is overwhelming. Tinkerbell is a jealous, pouting but pneumatic airhead, and as for the simpering mermaids! 

Disney made amends with Ariel in 1989, but if you remade Peter Pan now half the lost boys would be girls, the Red Indians would be called something else, the mermaids would be gay and Captain Hook would be registered disabled. Come to think of it, I’d enjoy that film.

As for the crows in Dumbo and the King of the Swingers in the Jungle Book, best not go there. Some things must change. In the US comedy series Hacks, a film executive explains a new project: “It’s a remake of Sleeping Beauty,” he tells his colleagues, “Except consensual”.

But this cuts both ways. The talented Zegler decided to distance the new Snow White from the old one, dissing the 1937 original as being a film in which the prince “literally stalks” the heroine. Which is true, to a point. But did she know that the legendary Soviet director, Sergei Eisenstein, described it as the greatest movie ever made?

Eisenstein wasn’t talking about the plot, but the virtuosity of the whole project. The great American film critic Roger Ebert wrote in the 1980s that Snow White “remains the jewel in Disney’s crown… The word genius is easily used and has been cheapened, but when it is used to describe Walt Disney, reflect that he conceived of this film, in all of its length, revolutionary style and invention, when there was no other like it – and that to one degree or another, every animated feature made since owes it something”

Given all that, Disney was cruising for a bruising when it planned a remake. And, contrary to the gripes of the anti-woke critics, the plot is very similar to the original, even if everything else is (and here I rely as ever on Mark Kermode) pretty much botched.

Both ways, the film becomes a vehicle for disputes which go well beyond its own merits and faults. As in a fashion does Adolescence. But whereas the one product marks the imaginative stagnation of a money-hungry popular culture, the other shows what can happen when – against the odds – you make art that has social integrity. The debates you engender have real meaning, not the forced and silly partisanship of the culture wars.

David Aaronovitch is a journalist, television presenter and author