It’s been exactly a month since the British limited crime drama series Adolescence—created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, and starring Owen Cooper—premiered on OTT streaming platform Netflix.
Since then, the show, which revolves around 13-year-old Jamie Miller (played by Cooper), who is arrested for allegedly stabbing his classmate Katie Leonard to death, has sparked a plethora of debates online and offline about crimes that are motivated by misogyny.
The show’s creators have repeated in multiple interviews since March 13 that the story is not a whodunnit, but a whydunit. For the show’s characters, the crux of the crime comes down to just one question: Why did Jamie kill Katie? Other queries then follow… Were they friends, or more? Did they have a fight? Why would a kid who has grown up in a loving family— fortunately devoid of violence —do such a heinous thing?
An indication towards the answer comes in episode two, when detective inspector Luke Bascombe’s son, Adam, who is also Jamie’s senior in school, helps the police look beyond what seems obvious.
Bascombe says, “Katie was bullying Jamie. Incel stuff. You know what that is.” His colleague, detective sergeant Misha Frank, chimes in, “It’s the involuntary celibate stuff. It’s the Andrew Tate shite.”
‘Involuntary celibate’ (or incel for short) was first coined in the 1990s by Alana, a “nerdy queer woman who had never been on a date, and who wanted a name for her loneliness and the loneliness of others like her”, writes Amia Srinivasan, Chichele professor of social and political theory at All Souls College, Oxford University, in her 2021 book, The Right to Sex. Srinivasan adds, “The term can, in theory, be applied to both men and women, but in practice it picks out not sexless men in general, but a certain kind of sexless man —the kind who is convinced he is owed sex, and is enraged by women who deprive him of it.”
While a lot many discussions have happened about incel culture, the ‘manosphere’—defined as online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism—and the glorification of violence online in the past few weeks, none of this is new, tragically.
Crimes against women have happened for as long as one can remember—be it acid attacks, revenge porn, or even murders when a woman has not reciprocated a man’s feelings. This is also not the first time that such a crime has been represented in cinema or popular culture. In 2020, Meghna Gulzar’s Chhapaak fictionalised the real-life story of acid attack survivor Laxmi Agarwal, who was attacked when she was barely 15 years old by a man over twice her age for simply rejecting his marriage proposal. On the other hand, in the past few years, films like Kabir Singh (2019) and Animal (2023) have received backlash for ‘normalising’ intimate partner violence.
Srinivasan’s book, too, documents crimes perpetrated against women by men, even minor boys, in the UK, US, and Canada because they reportedly felt they were “entitled to sex”.
In 2014, Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old college dropout, stabbed two of his housemates to death, shot three women at the University of California, Santa Barbara, killing two of them, and then shot another student, while wounding 14 others. Later that day, he died by suicide. Rodger left behind a memoir-manifesto titled My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger where he said that this was “his ‘war on women’, in the course of which he would ‘punish all females’ for the crime of depriving him of sex,” writes Srinivasan.
Rodger’s manifesto became almost like a holy book for incels from then on. In 2018, a 25-year-old Alek Minassian in Canada killed 10 and injured 16 people. Srinivasan documents in her book, “Before the attack, he had posted on Facebook, ‘The Incel Rebellion has begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!’”
If all of this seems too far away for you to discern the magnitude of crimes against women, let’s look closer home. The National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) latest report on ‘Crimes in India’ from 2022 states that 445,256 crimes were perpetrated against women in the country that year, which was an increase from the 428,278 crimes against women reported in 2021, and 371,503 reported in 2020.
In 2022, of the 445,256 crimes, 140 were cases of acid attacks, 250 were murder with rape/gang rape, and 31,982 were rape cases. A simple math deduction will tell you that on an average, 87 rape cases were reported each day in India in 2022.
Glorification of crime
Figures like these might make you question then—if crimes against women have always been rampant, then what is it about Adolescence that has shaken people so much? Urvashi Butalia, activist and co-founder of Zubaan Books, tells FE, “We are seeing a growing incel culture, which, like violence against women, is not new, but now there is a vocabulary for it, a platform for it, and an increasing tolerance of it. More, a glamourising of it, all of which makes for a dangerous cocktail.”
That actually hits the nail on the head. Thanks to social media and the internet, which are all-pervasive, access to misogynistic ‘content’ is not very far away. In fact, it’s so much at your fingertips that you don’t even have to go looking for it.
It’s what the show’s creator Graham, who also plays Eddie Miller (Jamie’s father), laments in the last episode, as he tells his wife that he was simply looking for something gym-related when the internet bombarded him with advice about what ‘real men’ should do. In fact, even if it is the algorithm that leads you to manosphere, it’s the violent imagery and theories that radicalise boys. What it does is that it takes the anger that young people feel towards the socio-economic, capitalism-induced issues of the time and turns them into hatred for the self and the female gender.
In the show, Jamie tells a psychologist that he believes he is ugly. Last January, a TikTok trend that went viral—looksmaxxing— had its origins in incel culture too. It promoted a practice called ‘bone smashing’ where it encouraged people to use blunt force on their face to reshape and beautify it. That’s not all. Even the language that incel forums use regularly are an entirely different ballgame, and might sound alien to someone who is not a part of them, like a parent or guardian figure.
What also shook people after Adolescence was watching a kid commit a brutal crime and not be affected by it. There is no sense of remorse or guilt in Jamie till the very end of the series, which shows a journey of 13 months since he is first arrested. It’s almost as if he is de-sensitised to violence.
Says Butalia, “Despite our claims to be a non-violent society, violence, particularly against women, but also against anyone who is seen as ‘different’ has always been normalised and acceptable. What social media has done is to magnify that to the power of something else.”
This is something we’ve known for quite a while. Any hate you perpetrate on the internet is acceptable, it’s normalised. The internet can isolate you in silos of dangerous content, it can brainwash you into an ideology you might not fully understand too, and it can push you to do real-world harm not just to others but to yourself as well. An example of such ideologies came through a recent report by King’s College London and Ipsos, which found that 57% of Gen Z believed “we have gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men”.
The (missing) victim
What also strikes the audience during and after a viewing of the show is that while the conversation is always about violence against women, the show never delves on the victim. Katie’s life is erased, literally and metaphorically. We talk about the impact of incel culture and the manosphere on Jamie’s life—we are told he used to sketch and paint before his parents started finding him always cooped up in his room surfing the internet. It humanises Jamie and the Millers. It makes us feel empathetic to the family’s plight—could they have done more?
But it also raises the question of whether the debates about incel culture are happening only because people are starting to realise that it harms boys too. In 2022, a study titled ‘Levels of Well-Being Among Men Who Are Incel (Involuntarily Celibate)’, which was published in Springer Nature journal, found that 75% of the self-identified incels who participated in the study were “clinically diagnosable with severe or moderate depression, and 45% with severe anxiety”.
These are vulnerable young men, after all, who are pushed towards extreme ideas of what masculinity should be.
Mimansa Singh Tanwar, lead clinical psychologist, department of mental health and behavioural sciences, Fortis Healthcare, agrees, “When a young person is going through something or feeling vulnerable with one’s own self, they may go out in an online space to try to understand what they may be going through. They might not be able to identify with larger societal values, and just need a community where they can express and share freely. But a lot of what is shared online is often unfiltered and unmonitored. And there are always predators present.”
“If a child is having a deficit of social skills, or facing challenges in maintaining/ building friendships, or even has gone through a challenging experience in life, that child might be vulnerable and a lot more prone to the ‘stereotypical and polarised thou-ght processes’ being propagated online,” she adds.
What makes this more scary is that no matter how tech-savvy the guardian figures in your life are, they can’t possibly control every aspect of what you see on the internet. The offline behaviour you exhibit might still be in their hands —how you behave at home and in school, who you meet outside of these places—but beyond that, what you do in the unregulated digital space is not something they’d be able to decipher if they don’t actively listen and engage with young people. The question for parents that the show puts forward is—how do you understand the language of violence if words (and emojis) have changed meanings?
Is there a solution?
Whether there can be a solution to a problem where there’s not any one particular authority to blame remains to be answered by policy experts. For now, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office has backed Netflix’s initiative to screen the show in secondary schools. His office said that it “will help students better understand the impact of misogyny, dangers of online radicalisation and the importance of healthy relationships.”
Butalia tells FE, “It’s good that there are so many conversations about it, in the media, television, elsewhere, that can only help. But resolutions are not quick fixes and have to be worked upon.”
That makes sense. But how do you address these concerns in the very first place? Laws against violence in any form already exist. Should social media platforms be doing better?
Incidentally, in 2017, Reddit closed down a 40,000-member incel support group after it introduced a new policy of “prohibiting content that encourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence”. Srinivasan writes in her book, “What had started out as a support group for the lonely and sexually isolated had become a forum whose users not only raged against women and the ‘noncels’ and ‘normies’ who got to sleep with them, but also frequently advocated rape.”
In recent years, we’ve seen a much more proactive approach by global governments when it comes to minors using social media as well. In November last year, Australia’s parliament voted to ban children under 16 years of age from using social media. At the time of the announcement, Australian PM Anthony Albanese had told reporters, “We want our kids to have a childhood and parents to know we have their backs.” The focus was on “having the parents’ back” makes sense when a series like Adolescence shows just how alienated the digital world can make guardians feel.
It’s not just Australia, though. In France, social media platforms need to obtain the consent of parents if kids under 15 years want to create an account. In Germany, kids aged 13-16 years need parental consent to use social media, and in Italy, kids below the age of 14 need parental consent. Similarly, in Belgium, you can’t create a social media account if you’re under the age of 13. The Netherlands, on the other hand, has banned the use of mobile phones in school classrooms. The UK’s Kids Online Safety Act is also meant to protect minors.
India is also not far behind when it comes to policy interventions. In January this year, the Centre released draft rules of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023, under which it proposed that any user below the age of 18 years will need “verifiable parental consent” to access social media. The burden to ensure parental consent has been placed on data fiduciaries before they process any personal data belonging to minors; who can rely on government-issued IDs or digital identity tokens.
Even the platforms are now working on stricter regulations. In September 2024, Meta introduced Instagram Teens—which it also recently brought to India in February this year. The platform noted that it will “automatically place teens into Teen Accounts, and teens under 16 years will need a parent’s permission to change any settings to be less strict.” These accounts, meant to protect minors, would be private by default and will only allow people they follow or are already connected with to message them. These accounts will also limit sensitive content, tagging options, have time limit reminders, and be sleep mode enabled.
This Friday, Meta also announced that teens under 16 cannot go live or disable the feature that blurs unwanted images in messages.
But when it comes to regulating access, there’s an important distinction to be noted. Aparajita Bharti, founding partner at The Quantum Hub—an impact-oriented public policy research and advocacy firm, tells FE, “What many people need to understand is that social media is only a subpart of the internet. Kids access gaming platforms, online forums, education sites, AI tools, search engines and a lot more. Selectively banning social media would do no good because a lot of platforms offer social media-like features that can be easily accessed by children.” “What we need is a 360-degree approach. Platforms need to be safe by design, and law needs to give guidelines to platforms— like the UK did in 2021 with the age-appropriate design codes that keep kids safe and let them have a safer experience online,” says Bharti.
The warning signs
So what really is the resolution, then? There are warning signs that parents should look out for, says Tanwar of Fortis Healthcare. “Parents need to be able to recognise how their child is doing, the challenges they are going through, whether the child is lacking social/interpersonal skills, whether they have issues with their self-esteem or confidence, whether they are showing any kind of recluse behaviour, or skipping other things to spend more time on their gadgets,” says Tanwar.
She adds, “We need to ensure our children are media literate and have conversations with them about privacy and safety from early on. We need to be aware of what is going on in the children’s life—not just in the academic sphere, but in their social life and their personal life as well.”
This is where schools need to come in. Tanwar believes that the kind of extreme ideas kids are exposed to online need to be countered through media literacy skills, gender sensitivity lessons, and anti-bullying awareness programmes—both at the prevention and intervention level.
Bharti, too, agrees with Tanwar. She says, “We need a thoughtful approach on the schools’ side since a lot of education is now becoming digitised. We need to make changes to school curriculum to teach children about the harms and uses of the online world to build their resilience. At the same time, we need to address and debunk the hateful narratives on the internet; and equip parents with digital literacy so that they have the right tools to protect their children— especially in a country like ours where the digital divide is huge.”
The way to address these issues is first equipping children with empathy at an emotional and a thought-development process. “Help your children understand the nuances of healthy relationships, how to deal with rejections, and how to be empathetic towards their own self and others. Be non-judgemental, supportive, and actively listen to your child’s problems,” advises Tanwar.
