Netflix’s "Adolescence" is DANGEROUS FICTION: 13-Year-Old Boys are NOT Misogynistic Killers! Before You Do More Harm to Children, READ THIS!
Child trauma specialist who works on the front lines knows what teen boys are really going through—and it’s probably not what you think.
As a professional who has spent the past almost-30 years working in the trenches with children and youths, the wildly popular British Netflix mini-series, Adolescence breaks my heart. Not only is this show a dramatized, fictional story with little basis in reality, it is most insidiously a piece of political propaganda. The show’s motive is to alarm you into believing that boys are predators-in-training and “toxic masculinity” is at the root. This show is devastatingly dangerous and irresponsible in inciting more contempt, harshness, and misunderstanding from adults toward adolescent boys than boys already receive. Parents and professionals, please take a deep breath and come to your senses: Adolescence and its plot, its story, and its main character—13-year-old “Jamie” who murders his classmate, “Katie”—ARE FAKE and have little basis in reality. In the real, flesh-and-blood world of our sons, there is something very different going on: Boys are suffering emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, but the adults around them will not open their eyes to the traumas that boys are suffering.
The show’s creators want you to believe that a small, skinny, baby-faced, adorable 13-year-old boy who comes from a middle-class, two-parent-headed, reasonably loving household suddenly becomes a rageful, cold-blooded killer of an innocent female classmate after coming across online content that criticizes feminist ideology and shows sympathy for males. Barring the fact that this plot insinuates that feminist ideology should not be criticized and that acknowledging the suffering of males is bad, the series shows a gross ignorance of actual childhood development and neuroscience: At the root of youth violence is childhood developmental trauma, not “toxic masculinity”, not criticism of feminism.
In reality, 13-year-old boys are children who are more than a decade away from neurological adulthood. They are often still playing with toys, collecting trading cards, or are magical thinkers in their fantasies of sports, adventures, Pokémon, video games, movies, heroes, and yes, girls. They are just in the very beginning stages of formal operations, which is the ability to think abstractly. Abstract thinking takes decades to mature, and this includes understanding how immediate choices in the present continue to impact variables of the future… It also includes the ability to grasp the permanence and finality of death on the physical realm—that a murdered classmate won’t come back at some point during adulthood.
13-year-old boys are not as sexualized as Hollywood has portrayed them for decades. In fact, it is often their 13-year-old counterparts, the girls, usually 1-5 years ahead of boys in pubertal and sexual development, who are commonly sexually, verbally, and physically forward, assertive, and even aggressive toward boys. Instead, most 13-year-old boys still long to be snuggled and tucked in at night by their parents. They feel overwhelmed by how verbally, physically, and sexually aggressive girls can be toward them. While young adolescent boys are experiencing the feelings of puberty, they are often ambivalent about attention from girls and are often confused about what girls want from them and how to interact.
When 12 or 13-year-old boys become sexually active, sometimes it is a case of curiosity between peers that went too far. Most of the time, it is due to a history of earlier sexual abuse, exposure to online porn (including nudes sent by peers), lack of nurturance from their parents, lack of parental supervision and involvement, social pressure, or sexual pressure or date rape in which they were the victims.
But, for a 13-year-old boy to commit a crime like that of the fictional “Jamie” in Adolescence, he would have:
a remarkable history of childhood developmental trauma: Profound loss--including of one or both biological parents, abandonment, parent-child attachment disruption, early exposure to family or community violence, exposure to porn, sexual assault or rape, physical abuse, severe neglect, foster care, or group placement; or
a recent history of taking dangerous psychiatric drugs like SSRIs and anti-psychotic “mood stabilizer” drugs; or
a history of traumatic brain injury, traumatic early hospitalization or surgery (including circumcision), developmental delays, or other undiagnosed medical or neurological problem.
And there is one additional variable, if paired with one of the above:
A history of being the victim of ostracism or bullying in which he felt powerless to defend or protect himself.
In the story’s plot, “Jamie” and his friends are bullied and ostracized for being perceived as unattractive, small, weak, and not part of the popular crowd. “Katie”, who is a popular girl, sends nudes of herself to a popular boy in school, and as can be expected with teenagers, the recipient spreads “Katie’s” nudes around. When “Katie” suffers backlash from her fellow classmates, “Jamie” attempts to reach out to “Katie” and ask her out on a date to the fair, hoping that in her moment of being ostracized, she would be more inclined to accept. Instead of merely saying, “No, thank you”, we learn that “Katie” rejects “Jamie” in a cruel manner. She begins to publicly bully “Jamie” on Instagram using emojis that symbolize that she thinks he is ugly, undesirable, and will be an “incel” (involuntarily celibate) for the rest of his life.
As a professional who works regularly with bullying victims, I have witnessed the devastation that cruel rejection and social media bullying does to real kids who already perceive themselves to be “ugly” or social “losers”. Such bullying might cause a child to feel like his or her social life is over. He or she might feel suicidal… or homicidal. While absolutely not condoning violence, suicide, and murder, anyone who understands the adolescent brain should have the capability to empathize with the fact that bullying could lead a victim who might not have strong family and social supports to suicidal or homicidal ideation. However, in the show and in the forums online buzzing with hatred for adolescent boys, we are told that the circumstances of bullying and rejection do not count.
The forensic psychologist in the show who interviews “Jamie” in lock-up spins nearly everything that “Jamie” tells her into a narrative about “toxic masculinity”. When she asks the boy how his dad treats his mom, she doesn’t also follow up with, “How does your mom treat your dad?” “Jamie’s” vulnerabilities, his feelings for “Katie”, his looking at “Katie’s” nudes, his natural curiosity about sex and bodies, his pain from being rejected and humiliated, and his fear in grasping what he’s done, are viewed by the psychologist as motivated by misogyny. “Jamie” is not seen by her as traumatized by viewing “Katie’s” nude photos, nor as a victim of “Katie’s” Instagram bullying. “Jamie” isn’t understood to be a malleable, vulnerable child thrown to the wolves in toxic peer, school, and online social cultures. This mess of a fictional psychologist seems to even convey that she is also a victim of skinny-framed little “Jamie”: She flinches when he acts-out, she cries on the job, and she acts scared when he throws tantrums during her session. She fails to do a proper goodbye session with the child, and then when he panics about losing her, she refuses to validate him when he begs to know if he is worth liking. The show’s writers and producers want us to see the grown woman with a doctorate degree as yet another “victim” of “Jamie’s” “misogyny”!
All of the Caucasian boys and men in Adolescence are portrayed as “bad” or inept in some way, while girls and women are either benevolent or spun as victims. Even when “Jade”, best friend of “Katie”, shoves, knocks down, and attacks “Jamie’s” best friend, “Ryan” at school, she is portrayed as blameless. “Jade” looks 16 and is twice the size of lanky, child-like “Ryan”. In spite of her viciously kicking and stomping on him, bloodying his face, and leaving him with a black eye, “Jade” is given a pass because she is distraught about losing her best friend. Even though both “Jade” and “Ryan” resist questioning from and are disrespectful to the police officers who show up at the school, only “Ryan” is chased down, grabbed, manhandled, shouted at, and arrested—all while injured from “Jade’s” earlier attack on him. We are never led to believe that “Jade” or “Katie” bullied boys from a place of “toxic femininity” and misandry.
The plot of Adolescence is fictional and not plausible: While it was reportedly inspired by the tragic murder of 12-year-old Ava White of Liverpool, England by a 15-year-old boy over a Snapchat video dispute, the boy didn’t have a TV-normal life anything like “Jamie”. The real killer was reportedly under assessment for Autism Spectrum Disorder and he had a history of being exposed to ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences), including domestic violence, community violence, and his father in prison. He was also allowed to play Call of Duty, a violent MMORPG video game rated M. To frame this another way, it wasn’t “toxic masculinity” or misogyny that led the 15-year-old boy to kill Ava, but early and chronic childhood developmental trauma and neglect compounded by possible developmental disability. The fault lies with the adults in the boy’s life who didn’t protect him from violence nor from screen use.
Adolescence’s Marxist-inspired political narrative (Male = Oppressor/Female = Victim) is dangerous to real, flesh-and-blood boys because it adds insult to injury. The narrative puts parents and professionals into warfare mode against adolescent boys over a fake story. This show is steering parental and professional attention away from the fact that our boys are actually suffering an unprecedented mental health crisis, serious detriments to their health and well-being, and developmental, educational, attachment, and even spiritual traumas. Boys and young men are struggling in every domain of life but they lack the nurturing supports, positive validation, male-sensitive services, and community empowerment programs available to girls and young women.
Included in their struggles, boys and young men have been encountering over 25 years of negativity about boyness, maleness, masculinity, and men while their sisters are empowered, championed, praised, and deified. Boys grow up seeing, “Girl Power” with no “Boy Power” counterpart and books with titles like, I Hate Men and The End of Men. They have natural feelings of attraction for girls, but the girls are groomed by adults and the media to have contempt for boys. Boys consume incessant media in which nearly every male is portrayed as a frumpy buffoon or an irrelevant, incompetent idiot alongside super-powered, competent, beautiful but aloof women. Boys hear statements like, “Girls Rule, Boys Drool”, “masculinity is toxic”, and “The Future Is Female”. Many boys have no family practice of spirituality that could counteract these negative messages with beliefs in the inherent worth of each person in the eyes of our Creator.
Adolescence has some truth to it about a small sub-culture of boys seeking out online content that is critical of feminism and sympathetic towards the plight of males. While the show described this as “radical”, it is a reaction to the Male = Oppressor/Female = Oppressed feminist ideology, which also must be seen as “radical”, as it is rooted in Marxism. (Marxism is the Oppressed/Oppressor political ideology that led to the slaughters of over a hundred million people under Communist Russia and Communist Maoism in China.) An even smaller subset of boys and young men are, unfortunately accessing online content that is misogynistic in reaction to the rejection, negativity, and dehumanization they endure. Given everything they are left to shoulder on their own, with the adults in their lives having no idea what boys are going through, is it any wonder that boys are escaping into online spaces and unfortunately finding themselves involved with dangers like video game addiction, porn, sextortion, violence, bullying, and yes, even misogynistic humor and commentary? Is it misogyny or a reaction to misandry that is at the root of this problem?
Rather than jump on the post-Adolescent rage bandwagon to exorcise the fake “Jamie” out of our teenage boys, Parents, Teachers, and Counselors, please stop. Just STOP! You are chasing fiction, but you will drive suicide and violence. Please do not continue to shame your sons, young students, and young clients; please do not multiply the traumas our boys are already enduring. The negativity, shaming, vitriol, and contempt against our young males has been driving them to a suicide crisis that the media—and the mini-series, Adolescence—ignores: Up to 81% of suicide deaths of children ages 10-24 years old are boys and young men. This is not “toxic masculinity”; this is despair, this is hopelessness, this is developmental trauma, this is having your suffering ignored and your feelings maligned.
It is time for us as parents and professionals to nurture, empower, protect, and heal our boys from the traumas that are compromising their holistic development. If you don’t know where to begin, my second book, Nurturing and Empowering Our Sons is where to start.
