Adolescence
- Rita Egolf
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
We didn’t know what he was going to do.” Shouldn’t we have done more, though?”
“I think it’d be good if we accepted that maybe we should’ve done. I think it’d be OK for us to think that.
This is the final conversation that takes place between Eddie and Manda Miller, two fictional characters and parents of the fictional Jamie Miller from Netflix’s Adolescence. The show was released on 13th March and went on to record the biggest audience for any streaming TV show in the UK in a single week.
Its exponential rise to the top of the weekly audience charts was due to its sobering exploration of the effect that online misogyny and incel culture has on the attitudes and behaviour of young people in the UK, particularly teenage boys. It also debuts an astonishing performance by Owen Cooper who plays 13 year old Jamie, accused of murdering his classmate Katie after she bullies him online.
An Object Lesson?
Many would say it’s timely; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently remarked that “we also see acts of extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety, sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups, but fixated on that extreme violence seeming only for its own sake.” Starmer this week also confirmed that Adolescence will be aired for free in secondary schools across the UK, such is its perceived value as a teaching tool for students, teachers and their parents.
There is certainly much that is pertinent and necessary about the story told through Adolescence’s four episodes: the addictive nature of social media, and how teenagers lack the emotional intelligence necessary to navigate and protect themselves from it; the naivety of many parents about what their children are accessing online and how easily it can indeed be accessed; the growing number of misogynistic influencers and the problematic violent language that some young men parrot without understanding the full extent of its derogatory nature.
I’m a female secondary school teacher* married to a secondary school teacher, both of us working in areas of high deprivation. We know the impact that unfettered access to social media without the relevant safeguards can have on young people. We also have two young daughters, the eldest of which is desperate for a mobile phone and, almost via osmosis, senses the intractable lure of Snapchat and TikTok, despite my husband and I not having accounts on either of these platforms.
All that to say: some of the narrative of Adolescence really does ring true for me. As well as this, it’s easy to be drawn into the drama, and there’s much to praise about the show. Each episode is filmed in one continuous take, and this alone makes it almost compulsive to watch. The dialogue is believable and there are elements of many parents’ struggles epitomised in Eddie and Manda Miller. There are incredible raw performances, especially during a heartbreaking scene as the final episode draws to a close, where Eddie sobs on Jamie’s bed, Jamie’s childish space-scene wallpaper cruelly juxtaposed against the truth of the crime he has committed.
Too Neatly Packaged?
But, despite acknowledging all of that good stuff, I think the accusation could also be levelled that Adolescence takes the problem of teens’ access to online content, packages it neatly and singularly as incel culture, and presents it as society’s central ill, without really offering any nuances or solutions.
The message of Adolescence seems to be: we’ve finally discovered it! The REAL problem! If we can only find a way to sort this, we’ve sorted everything! And I just don’t know if I buy it, especially as a Christian.
In his 1942 apologetic novel The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis imagines a senior devil, Screwtape, and the letters of advice he sends to a less experienced devil, Wormwood. The letters focus chiefly on temptation, and how to keep Christians distracted, so that they don’t ever really know and follow God. In one of his letters, he writes, “It’s funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”
I can’t help but feel that Adolescence is a little bit like this. It diagnoses a problem for people to worry about, but It doesn’t prescribe a cure. There’s a risk with buying wholesale into the messages of Adolescence, and it’s that we become so busy looking the other way, at solving the (legitimate) problem of the online space for children that we forget to intervene with Biblical values. We forget to see the bigger picture.
Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not denying that there is a huge problem with young peoples’ use of the internet and social media. The data is clear: online incel culture and misogyny is on the rise, and so is violence against women. Recent research from Prevent (an organisation forming part of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy) shows that of all of the referrals they made to their deradicalisation program ‘Channel’, 22.7% of them were incels.
The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) published their report ‘Lost Boys: State of the Nation’ this month, which states that a quarter of young men were likely watching porn every or for most days. It also explains that in 2023, the third most Googled person in the world was Andrew Tate.
In 2024, a report by the NPCC College of Policing noted that there had been a 37% increase in the number of reported crimes of violence against women and girls between 2018 and 2023. And sadly this isn’t just in secular culture. I have far too many female friends and family members who were victims of coercive control and domestic violence in Christian marriages. So, hear me when I say: there is a problem, and it needs addressing. But actually, if we take the time to look at this issue more deeply, it’s clear that it’s part of a much bigger problem altogether.
Something Wrong Deeper Down
In the school where I work, I see children and young people who are often at a loss for any identity at all. This manifests in many different ways – defiance, aggression, anxiety, depression, emotional disregulation, risk-taking behaviour such as alcohol and drug abuse, gender dysphoria and poor conflict resolution skills to name a few.
This is the complexity that Adolescence misses by trying to focus so wholesale on one small part of a greater issue that is underpinned by abandonment of Biblical values of masculinity, femininity, and what the Bible has to say about the value of women and how good men should be treating them.
The CSJ report cited earlier would support this. Across its 74 pages of rather bleak findings it lists the following as key reasons why boys and young men are (to use their words) ‘in crisis’: lack of meaningful employment, underachievement at school, an ‘epidemic of fatherlessness’, violent crime, declining physical and mental health, and the rise of online porn and digital technology.
Based on these findings, can we really believe that Adolescence’s Jamie Miller would have murdered his female classmate, stabbing her seven times because she commented with ‘incel’ emojis on his Instagram posts, and had a nude selfie shared by a male classmate?
I just don’t know. But I do know that a lot of what I encounter as a teacher, a parent and a woman is a result of a post-Christian society that insists on creating its own truth. The world has told parents the lie of giving their children freedom to set their own identity, to look to strangers online to tell them who they are, and to step back from the responsibility of shepherding and nurturing their children as they should have. One thing that Adolescence has got right is that this isn’t working out well, for our young men or for our young women.
A Christian Response
How, then, do we respond to shows like Adolescence as Christians living in a fallen world? Let’s not be naive; social media and online misogyny are real and growing dangers for our kids. It’s good and right to want to do things that safeguard our children against this. But the set of circumstances we find ourselves in is simply a new outworking of living in a world marred by sin and brokenness.
My dad, who is now 85, often comments, ‘the world’s gone mad.’ He’s been saying that for 40 years (maybe even longer), and he’s right. But, might I also tentatively direct you towards the fact that around me I see, overwhelmingly, actually – good men.
In the church that I attend here in the North of England, I see men looking at the world around them and striving for better, and the trying to remedy problematic attitudes and behaviour generations before them might have modelled (a perspective which is given a nod in Adolescence when Jamie’s dad says, ‘When I had my own kids, I said I’d never do that. I just wanted to be better.’) I see men whose conduct and speech are respectful towards women and girls, seeking to build them up and honour them.
What shapes these good men? The Bible. It diagnoses the sin that spoils relationships between men and women, and gives us the real blueprint for the meaningful change that Adolescence and its supporters so desperately hope to bring about.
The Bible is our manual for human identity and relationships, starting right from the start in Genesis 1.
Jesus sets the standard for how to treat women with dignity and respect in John 4, acknowledging the Samaritan woman’s brokenness, borne out of placing her identity elsewhere. He diagnoses her problem, and offers her the living water ‘welling up to eternal life.’
Imagine if the world believed this solution. Our young men wouldn’t seek online approval or long for a love to fill the void which fatherlessness has left for so many of them. No more Jamie Millers, filled with self-hatred and rage. No more ‘loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety.’ Just a generation of young people certain of their identity as image bearers of God, loved enough for him to send his only son to die for them.
That’s the truth we need to share with our children, and model to the watching world. Screwtape wants us to leave that bit out, but don’t listen to him.
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