The Netflix series, Adolescence, was released just over a month ago. As a charity delivering relationships and sexuality education (RSE) in schools, the show centered many topics that are important to us and our work. Issues like: sexual and gender-based violence amongst young people; how young people navigate healthy relationships; and online harms such as digital image-based abuse or online cultures of misogyny and Inceldom.
We really welcome the discussions the show has helped create. These are important topics. However, we feel that some important things have been missed in some of these discussions. Based on our experiences of working with students in UK schools, we reflect on Adolescence and some of the ways it portrays misogyny in schools. We consider the ways the series has been talked about in public, as well as what important messages are missing and what we can all do next to tackle these harms.
Spoilers and warnings - This piece contains spoilers for the TV show. It also specifically addresses lots of the issues featured in Adolescence, in some detail. This includes things like sexual violence, misogyny and the murder of a child.
There was a lot to love about Adolescence. In an age of ‘second screen’ entertainment - viewers often having phones or other devices open whilst watching TV - it was absolutely compelling. It was brilliantly written, acted and shot. There is something powerful about this show and it has managed to draw in a large audience and engage them around really tough subjects. Even the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has commented on Adolescence and the issues it features. Repeatedly. The show has drawn in many people and got them interested in trying to understand misogyny in schools. This is a really important and powerful phenomenon.
Even though Adolescence centers around a very extreme and rarer type of misogynistic violence - murder - it felt like it did a pretty good job of showing how normalised and everyday misogyny and sexual violence in schools can be. The adoption of harmful, misogynistic and violent language and behaviour by young people - specifically boys and young men - is, in our experience, extremely common. We often encounter comments and ideas from students that echo these sentiments. A couple of weeks ago, one of our facilitators was told, “She was kind of asking for it,” by a student. This was in response to a hypothetical scenario involving catcalling and sexual harassment in a school setting. The work that we do often involves unpacking and constructively challenging these sorts of ideas.
We also felt very seen by the depictions of misogyny against school staff - something else we experience in schools through pupils behaving very differently towards adults in a gendered way. This dynamic is captured well in Adolescence. The second episode is set in Jamie’s school. In this environment, we see lots of examples of male teachers acting in a domineering way - aggressively shouting at students to get them to behave.
Our facilitator, Emma, was particularly struck by this aspect. They described the figure of the ‘shouty man teacher’ seen several times in the second episode as ‘very familiar’, likening it to their experiences of being in schools, where an authoritative senior teacher - usually a man - will turn up to shout for order in an unruly classroom, then disappear.
The way in which boys can behave differently to women who are authority figures in their lives and the way misogyny is enacted through this is shown throughout Adolescence. We see students talk disparagingly about women teachers in the corridor on several occasions - for example, “What the fuck’s she on?” from one student after being told to tuck his school shirt in, or the angry response from a male pupil who Mrs Fenumore briefly interacts with whilst leading the police officers through the canteen. In the third episode, we see Jamie adopt some of this misogynistic behaviour towards Briony Ariston - a psychologist and one of the few female characters in Adolescence who we get to hear from at length. He shouts and threatens, at one point yelling, “You don’t tell me what to do, get that into your little head.” When eventually a member of the facility staff comes in, this seems to echo the experience Emma described in schools - an authoritative man coming in to deal with challenge from boys, using masculinity to make them submissive.
Illustration by Hannah Brown
Adolescence portrays some really important issues in a way that feels very authentic to us as practitioners working with youth in UK schools. But the way the public have spoken about it has been quite frustrating to us, as an organisation trying to address sexual and gender-based violence amongst young people. We will now consider where we feel Adolescence falls short - or at least, where the public discussion around it has.
One thing we feel very strongly is that, while Adolescence has been a great way of getting adults’ attention and interest in the issues, it is absolutely not appropriate as a resource for teaching young people about misogyny, relationships, violence prevention or digital harms. Netflix announced that they would be making the series available for schools to show their students. We would strongly discourage schools from doing this, for a number of reasons.
Although it is about young people, Adolescence is very much framed from an adult point of view. We see the story almost entirely from their perspectives. We only very briefly ever see young people interacting without adults present. Adolescence is a great window into how parents and professionals grapple with things like gender-based violence in schools or inceldom. It’s a great device for engaging the wider community into the issue of misogyny and violence amongst young people. But it doesn’t really speak to what their experiences are like or, for young people at least, what needs to change in their lives to address the harms depicted. Since the show was released, we haven’t really noticed young people themselves talking about Adolescence in schools. This makes sense, given that the focus of the show is not actually young peoples’ first-hand experiences.
On a practical note, showing Adolescence in schools will be logistically hard. Although a miniseries consisting of just four episodes, this amounts to over four hours of viewing. Whilst a part of the statutory national curriculum, we find that RSE subjects are often not given priority in terms of time and other resources dedicated to them in schools. It is often deprioritised for other core subjects, particularly ones that older students will be examined on. We will often be asked to deliver topics in a shorter time than we would like - for example, just 50 minutes for a workshop on sexual violence prevention or navigating digital media. In public discussions about Adolescence, some have made suggestions to add content to what is taught in classrooms to address the issues the show raises. Whilst we will always encourage reflection around how to improve the RSE curriculum, this discourse is not helpful if it comes without commitment and resources to help schools implement change. Access to a TV show alone just won’t cut that. We find Netflix’s announcement particularly interesting in light of the criticism DI Luke Bascombe, a police officer investigating Katie’s murder, makes after spending a day watching how the school operates:
“Does it look like anyone’s learning anything to you? It just looks like a fucking holding pen. Videos in every class.”
It is likely that the experiences of Jamie and his killing of Katie will seem very distant from the vast majority of students in the UK, even if the misogyny and digital harms that underpin them aren’t. To make those links and reflect on how to challenge and change misogyny in schools, we need more than this video in every class.
Though generally thought provoking, Adolescence doesn’t provide any concrete suggestions on how to tackle the problems featured. The concept of what exactly the problem is feels vague. Variously, “the computer”, “all that instagram stuff”, “incels” and “the manosphere” are positioned as the issue - without explicitly explaining how or even what these things really mean. Polina, one of our facilitators, described it feeling like social media was made into a “scapegoat” for Katie’s murder. There have been rumours about a possible second series of Adolescence. Polina is also a PhD candidate in media studies and commented that she would want to see “much more in depth engagement with what inceldom is” if this were to happen. She added that It would be important to see this much more directly addressed and unpacked. Because Adolescence doesn’t ever solidly commit to what could or should have been done to prevent Katie’s death. It is hinted at, at times. DS Misha Frank, another police officer investigating the murder reflects after the school visit,
“All kids need is one thing that makes them feel good about themselves.”
We get the impression from Briony Ariston (the psychologist), Eddie Miller (Jamie’s dad) as well as Jamie himself that part of the problem is what ‘being a man’ means to Jamie, and the lack of regard and self-esteem he has experienced growing up. We also see Luke (DI Bascombe) making tentative attempts to spend time with and bond with his son, Adam, after a day of witnessing how cold the school experience can be. We get the impression that adults need to be compassionate and interested in boys and young men, but nobody says it explicitly. In the final episode Jamie’s parents are discussing Jamie’s actions and if they could have done anything differently as parents to prevent him killing Katie. Manda Miller (Jamie’s mum) says to Eddie (his dad),
“I think it would be good… if we accepted that maybe we should’ve done [more to prevent what Jamie did]. I think it’d be okay for us to think that.”
There is a definite sense that things should be different, but no specifics about what that should look like. This is perhaps a completely reasonably (and realistic) conclusion to draw from a piece of television. But it’s disappointing that this general lack of commitment to clear, realistic and specific action has been reflected in the wider discourse.
Another feature of Adolescence that makes it dramatically interesting, but perhaps also unhelpful as a reference for how to tackle gender-based and sexual violence amongst youth, is just how heavily it is written from a masculine perspective. A majority of the significant characters are men - and to a lesser extent boys. Whilst it was brilliantly written and acted overall, we felt that the women and girls were typically not written as strongly as male characters. At least one of the four episodes doesn’t seem to pass the Bechdel test.
Perhaps this is largely due to the writing and producing team consisting heavily of men - and working together to produce an authentic feeling perspective of this issue. And this wouldn’t be a problem if we had a range of references and perspectives within our culture talking about these issues. But when it comes to gender-based violence, we simply don’t. In one of the few extended speeches given to a woman character in Adolescence, Misha (DS Frank) laments the fact that women and girls who have been murdered are never the focus of attention.
We are concerned about this reliance solely on the perspective of men, as well as a disregard for the experiences of women and girls, which seems to have spilled over into the public discourse. Many commentators have focused on the ideas and opinions of men, some resting on the idea of ‘positive masculinity’ rather than ‘toxic masculinity’. We strongly believe that the answer to gender-based violence amongst youth is to openly engage them in discussion and critical reflection about the ways in which the gender binary creates and reinforces harm. By ‘the gender binary’, we mean: the concept that everyone is either a man or a woman; that men and women are inherently completely different from each other, often rooted in biological myths as an explanation for these differences; and that any harms arising from these gender differences are inevitable and ‘natural’.
Examples of the gender binary we see in Adolescence include the expectation that men always want sex and are also not good at expressing emotions - other than through anger. In the discussions with Briony, the psychologist, we get the impression that Jamie feels pressure to make up and brag about being sexually experienced with girls. We also learn that he holds deeply negative views of himself, partly because he sees himself as “ugly” and unattractive to girls. It is not explicitly stated, but we as the viewers are left to draw conclusions that, after being romantically rejected by Katie, he felt compelled to respond with anger.
A big part of the work we do around sexual-violence prevention is talking to young people - including boys and young men - and asking them to critically reflect on the gender binary. This includes teaching them that it is important for people - of any gender - to accept romantic and sexual rejection without pressure, coercion or violence and that expressing feelings of sadness or vulnerability is okay and actually very human. Centering the conversation around ‘positive masculinity’ merely gives them an altered set of ideals to put in the rigid boxes of how men and boys should perform to comply with the gender binary. It does nothing to create freedom from gendered expectations.
Something Dolly, CEO of School of Sexuality Education, has said would be great to see in a second season of Adolescence is openly addressing the idea that ‘boys will only listen to men’ about misogyny or masculinity. Both in our work in schools and also in the public discussions around Adolescence we hear the idea that solving misogyny and gender-based violence is just about giving boys ‘good male role models’. Whilst it’s important that people of all genders are part of the conversation, focusing only on men’s roles perpetuates, rather than frees us from, the gender binary. It also reinforces the idea that women and girls have no authority or part in addressing gender-based violence, further perpetuating misogynistic assumptions. As we stated earlier, this is exactly the problematic gendered dynamic we see both authentically portrayed in Adolescence and in the work we do in schools.
Adolescence is an original and moving piece of work. It asks important questions about misogyny and violence amongst young people in the age of the manosphere. It has done a fantastic job of bringing these questions into public awareness. However, as a piece of cultural entertainment, its use in telling us how we answer these questions is extremely limited. As experts in the school RSE sector, we hope that people are able to translate this awareness into action. We hope that the parents and carers use it as a prompt to talk to young people, creating spaces in their lives where they feel valued, esteemed and heard. We hope that professionals, politicians and policy makers take it as a call to action to open and specifically work to raise and address these issues with young people.
Adolescence is currently available to view on Netflix. For more information about our workshops on a range of RSE topics, including on sexual violence prevention and healthy relationships, contact info@schoolofsexed.org.
For more information about our training programmes on tackling misogyny in schools and non-educational workplaces visit our CPD page.
