By Manus Lenihan – Socialist Party Ireland. 31 March 2025
Adolescence is shaping up to be one of the most talked-about TV dramas of the year. Partly this is down to the performances and production. Each episode unfolds in real time, and in a single take.
But it is really resonating with audiences because of its themes, especially masculinity, misogyny and gender-based violence, which are of burning relevance in 2025.
The series is set in the aftermath of a murder. A 13-year-old boy (Owen Cooper in an amazing debut) is alleged to have stabbed to death a girl of the same age.
Such crimes are not as rare as you would hope; the idea for the show came from two similar real-life crimes in Britain. Irish viewers will be reminded of the horrifying murder of 14-year-old Ana Kriégel in Lucan in 2018. The boys convicted of her murder, like the fictional accused Jamie, were just 13.
This set-up hits viewers hard, especially parents: what if you lost a loved one, not due to them being a murder victim, but due to them committing a murder?
In addition, any viewers who have worked in or around education, law or social services will have uncomfortable déja-vu moments as the camera roams around a police station, a school and a ‘training centre’ – actually a prison.
Adolescence stands in the powerful tradition of British social realism. Episode Two is spent entirely in the school that victim and perpetrator both attended.
The police visit to search for the murder weapon. But they come to understand a great deal about the background to the crime just by experiencing life in the school. Teachers bark orders and over-rely on videos. Students bully one another and are contemptuous and callous.
The crime was gestated in this underfunded institution, staffed by teachers too overworked and burned out to give kids the care and attention they need. But it could be argued that this episode is inauthentic: even the most deprived school would be subdued by profound shock immediately after the murder of a student.
The show taps into anxiety about how Big Tech is worming its way into the minds of children and how far-right ‘influencers’ are working around the clock to take advantage of boys’ insecurities.
Tiktok, for example, will actively promote misogynistic videos to young boys the first time they sign in to the app.
Adolescence addresses this explosion of online misogyny in the last ten-plus years. By half-way through, it’s clear that the ‘manosphere’ and ‘incel’ culture have lined up many of the dominoes for this murder.
The third episode, where the accused murderer Jamie sits down with a psychologist, hammers home how this culture grooms kids at a vulnerable age.
The revelations come out slowly but with explosive impact, such as the role of image-based abuse in the lead-up to the murder.
We see how the online hate preachers have told Jamie he’s worthless, which is largely left unchallenged in school and at home. He truly believes he will never have a girlfriend or have sex unless he resorts to manipulation and violence.
When Jamie’s sister (Amélie Pease) asks him, in a desperate attempt at a joke, if he will become a bodybuilder in prison, his reply is a flat no. That’s a sore point: Jamie is not an athletic kid, not the type of cocky, physically strong male valued by traditional gender roles.
He has learned to hate himself for falling short of society’s expectations of boys / men according to the rigid gender binary promoted at all levels of society. He idolises his father, who superficially hews closer to the ‘man’s man’ stereotype.
Many of our expectations are turned on their head. The accused is not a glassy-eyed psychopath, but a child who can be by turns cheeky, pitiful or terrifying.
Likewise we assume there must be dark secrets in Jamie’s home life, but his father Eddie (Stephen Graham, who also co-wrote) comes across as a decent person.
We feel for him keenly as the police subject their home to a terrifying invasion minutes after he returns home from a night shift; when he bravely protests at his son being strip-searched in front of him; as the evidence mounts up and he flinches away from his son’s outstretched hand.
Eddie is overworked and he and his wife (Christine Tremarco) have lost touch with their son’s emotional life, but they are not abusive or negligent.
Eddie was beaten by his own father and attempted to break the cycle of abuse. However, patriarchal gender roles are evident in the family unit with negative consequences.
Jamie has a formative memory of his father unable to look him in the eye when he fails to perform well in a football match, and another of his father tearing down a shed in a fit of rage. Still, Jamie’s shocking misogynistic violence cannot be explained without looking outside at the broader culture.
Eddie is not a saint and his character flaws are clear in the final episode, which highlights how his temper and emotions are carefully managed by the mother and daughter.
While his temper was not directed at them, the threat of aggression hangs in the air because that is how Eddie learned to cope, and the consequences of this are felt by women and children in particular.
It is true, as the show’s co-writer Jack Thorne has publicly argued, that children are particularly vulnerable to having their lives destroyed by toxic online communities. But it’s worth bearing in mind that people of all ages do irresponsible and harmful things on social media.
Those adults who verbally abuse strangers, repeat obvious lies and share faked images have no right to scold teenagers. Obviously, murderous sexism was claiming the lives of women and girls long before the internet.
Online communities can be a wholesome and positive lifeline for many young people. The problem is not that social media sites exist, but that they are owned privately and run for profit. They are designed to exploit our need for connection, ‘maximising engagement’ by bombarding us with content designed to make us feel like Jamie, worthless, afraid and resentful.
Tighter regulation of social media would be positive, especially around children, but public ownership of this public forum is what we really need to be talking about.
Meanwhile adults need to look out for and listen to the young people in their lives. Solidarity in our communities, strong bonds between the generations, and a hope for a brighter collective future can repair the gaping holes in capitalist culture where the misogynistic online creeps thrive.
Adolescence co-writer Jack Thorne says that when he spoke about the show on a video online, the comment section was taken up with strange men speculating about his testosterone and estrogen levels – a level of pure weirdness reminiscent of the ‘red-pilled’ conspiracy theorist who accosts Eddie in the DIY shop in the final episode.
That’s just one more example of how the emotions and moving parts in this story, though featured here in the context of a particularly horrible murder case, are widespread in our society and culture.