I recently watched the Netflix series Adolescence. I did so primarily for professional reasons, as the themes it explores are closely aligned with those I deal with daily in my work.
I must admit that I struggled to get through the series. I took extensive notes, trying to maintain a reasonably objective perspective, but I fear I didn’t quite succeed.
Having also grown spiritually within the Indian tradition, I know that after the Brahmacharya , the student’s ashram, comes Grihastha, the householder’s ashram — the stage I find myself in today. I am a husband and a father. Both roles have marked definitive turning points in my life. I have never regretted building a family with my wife, and I have never wished not to be a father.
Adolescence is essentially about children, parents, and teachers. I still haven’t decided whether the plot was intentionally written to be openly misandrist or whether, as I suspect is more likely, it was developed to show British society what it has allowed itself to become.
The casting, for example, is no accident. Every substantial character—every character who is significantly positive or in a clear position of power — is Black. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the choice per se, but since casting is a deliberate process, it’s important to underscore that this is a conscious decision either by the producers or the creators of the series. The reasons for that choice are never fully understood.
The series opens with an apparently casual conversation between a chief inspector and his teenage son. It’s staged to highlight the healthy relationship between the two. The chief inspector is relatively young but already holds a position of power. He is of African descent, strong, confident. Moments later, the scene shifts to a tactical squad from Scotland Yard storming the home of a lower-middle-class family. The door is smashed in with a battering ram, officers sweep the rooms with small-calibre weapons drawn, and in the end, they arrest the suspect: a thirteen-year-old boy named Jamie. He is handcuffed, separated from his family, and taken into custody.
The dialogue between the adults and the teenager is crafted to show how everything happening is completely beyond the boy’s comprehension. He is repeatedly asked if he understands the consequences of what’s going on. He’s subjected to a series of standard-procedure questions, including, “Have you ever tried to kill yourself?” All of this takes place without a parent present. I already had chills.
By the end of the episode, it becomes clear that Jamie is responsible for a violent crime. During the interrogation, irrefutable evidence is presented, but only after the arresting officers make several attempts to manipulate Jamie — who is assisted by is clueless father and a court-appointed lawyer — into confessing or at least slipping up.
The second episode opens at Jamie’s school. All the white characters at the school are portrayed negatively. Two of Jamie’s friends discuss their families’ reactions to the crime he’s accused of. While the Black character says “My dad went ballistic”, implying that the event did carry meaning for his family, the White scoffs “My parents couldn’t have cared less”. All the White teachers are shown as unable to manage their classrooms, lacking charisma, seemingly resigned to the inevitable. A Black female student assaults Ryan, one of Jamie’s friends, and the only comment from onlookers is “Ryan got beat up by a girl.”
The chief inspector and his partner are shown interviewing classmates and friends of the victim. What strikes me, both as a parent and as a teacher, is the way in which the interviews are conducted: the conversations happen without parental supervision, the students are never given an option to contact their parents. There is a member of the school staff present, but it is clearly depicted as someone the students are not familiar with and do not trust.
The episode’s most crucial moment—or at least the one presumably intended as such by the writers — is a conversation between the Chief inspector and his son, who also attends Jamie’s school. Without mincing words, the son says, “Since you’re going around in circles, let me explain what’s going on.” He then proceeds to list a few, relatively harmless clichés about the “manosphere,” the “80/20 rule,” and the meaning of emojis used in teenage messaging.
The point of all this is to suggest that Jamie, like many others, was manipulated by influencers who promote a brand of masculinity rooted in domination and violence. The problem is, there’s no further investigation by law enforcement, no in-depth analysis, no fact-checking. The investigators simply accept the explanation about the “manosphere” as fact—and, presumably, the viewers are expected to do the same.
In the end, Jamie’s White friend runs away from school. The Black inspector chases him down, corners him, and coerces a confession using both psychological and physical aggression — at which point Jamie’s fate is sealed. It emerges that Jamie had been the constant victim of cyberbullying by the very girl he eventually killed, instead of committing suicide as it often happens in similar situations, but no one seems to care.
The third episode contains scenes I found outright obscene. Jamie is in custody and takes part in a series of sessions with a female psychologist assigned to assess him and write a report for the judge. The psychologist’s behaviour is shamelessly predatory: she repeatedly plays with Jamie’s mental stability, successfully provoking aggressive reactions from him in which he expresses what is portrayed as a radically misogynistic attitude.
The psychologist bombards him with questions like, “How does it feel to be a man?” and “What do you think is the normal amount of sexual activity someone your age should have—with a boy or a girl?”. I kept thinking to myself: Jamie is thirteen years old, how is he supposed to know what being a man feels like in the first place?
It’s clear from the interaction that the sessions with the psychologist are valuable to Jamie because they offer a break from a daily routine that he finds suffocating and frightening. The psychologist encourages this dependency until she gets what she wants — then suddenly transforms into a complete stranger, severing the emotional bond.
The final episode depicts Jamie’s family experiencing the social stigma that derives from his trial. In one scene, his father is approached by a store clerk—skinny, unmuscular, bespectacled, and White — the polar opposite of the powerful, imposing chief inspector. The clerk whispers that he should turn to the “strength of the internet”, as this is clearly a case constructed for ideological purposes. When the father eventually breaks under pressure, he vandalizes his own van rather than lashing out at others.
I’ve read numerous commentaries — unfailingly from a very specific ideological and political perspective — that praise Adolescence as an invitation for men and boys to show “vulnerability” and reject violence. If that’s the case, it’s unclear why the chief inspector uses violence and aggression to extract the confession that condemns Jamie, why the Black female student assaults one of Jamie’s friends without apparent consequence, and so on.
To me, Adolescence is a harrowing depiction of the authorities’ — including schools’ — powerlessness to prevent incidents like these. There is mounting evidence in the EU that its attempt to redress “gender inequality” have led to the implementation of policies that have in fact penalized males for years. The rise of phenomena like the so-called “manosphere” cannot simply be dismissed as remnants of a “patriarchal culture”. In a truly healthy and egalitarian society, such movements would have no traction — because they’d have no reason to exist.
In Adolescence, parents are portrayed as equally incapable of understanding the world their children inhabit, the mechanisms that govern their interactions, and the means through which those interactions occur. There is an important debate underway about whether children should be given smartphones and internet access. For my part, I have no qualms about stating that a smartphone makes sense when it’s needed, not when it’s merely desired, but that’s not the real point. The fundamental issue is whether parents have created and maintained the conditions to ensure that dialogue with their children never breaks down.
Emanuele Bertolani
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