What makes Adolescence – the new Netflix crime drama – so powerful isn’t just its masterful production or its exceptional acting, writing or direction – it’s the stark, inescapable truth at its core. Jamie, the 13-year-old central character accused of murdering Katie, a 13-year-old-girl he knew, isn’t some sensationalised or stereotypical “troubled young man”. He’s just a regular boy. And that’s the really unsettling power and purpose of this miniseries; we get to realise what the lived experience of regular boyhood has become for so many young men growing up today. And let’s be really clear about something – this is not a new or foreign story to us; it has been happening in Ireland for a long time.
In May 2018, a 14-year-old girl was killed in Lucan, Co Dublin, and two 13-year-old boys were convicted of her murder, and one of them of aggravated sexual assault. Her name was Ana Kriégel.
But Adolescence isn’t about Ana or Katie. It points us instead to the root of the issue of violence against women and girls. And it puts a human face to it: the face of a charming, witty, fun-loving boy called Jamie. And it forces us to feel, to witness, to understand – beyond statistics and headlines – what it means to be a boy lost in the wilderness of modern masculinity. When the police crash through Jamie’s door, he isn’t a murderous monster – he’s a terrified 13-year-old tucked up in bed who wets himself in fear, calls out for his dad like the scared child he is, and who has to be reminded to eat his cornflakes before facing the weight of the accusations levelled against him. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he repeatedly cries.
I know Jamie; we all do. We all know lots of Jamies. We talk to them every day – in school corridors and classrooms, on the sports pitches, during rehearsals for the school musical, in youth centres, church prayer groups and juvenile detention centres. We talk to them around the dinner table, in the car on the way to school, in their bedrooms when we pop our heads in to say goodnight, wondering when it was they became too old to be tucked in.
Adolescence doesn’t just tell a story; we know by the end of episode one what has happened and who is responsible. Instead it holds up a mirror to male society and in the reflection it reveals some difficult and often heartbreaking truths about us, truths we need to address urgently – for our boys, for ourselves and for everyone else.
Truth #1: Our boys are desperate to be men
Every instinct in the male teenage being drives them to ask the same questions: what is it to be a man, and how do I become one? In Ireland, masculinity is at a crossroads. We are in the process of rejecting the harmful ideas of the past – we’ve seen the damage they do to us, to the women in our lives, to our children. But we are feeling our way slowly and uncertainly forward, afraid to get it wrong again. Young boys, desperate for guidance, find only an absence of it. Without the confidence in their own masculinity, fathers, grandfathers, public figures and community leaders are finding it hard to step up and define what it is we want modern Irish masculinity to be. But if we don’t fill that gap soon, others will – others who don’t care about the welfare of our children.
Truth #2: We are allowing our boys to be raised by misogynists
Online, unregulated influencers feed boys a toxic diet of misogyny. Boys are told that the world and women are against them. That men are being feminised, falsely accused of sexual crimes, and must dominate to be valued. In schools we see it daily: a charming, intelligent, considerate boy (like Jamie) stays behind after class to help put up the chairs and share a vulnerable insight, a witty anecdote, then moments later hurls a misogynistic jab at a passing girl to make his friends laugh, exaggerates his sexual exploits to impress them, tries to intimidate a female teacher in the corridor who attempts to reprimand him. Since the majority of Irish adolescents gained independent access to the internet, sexually violent crime perpetrated by under-18s has multiplied more than six-fold, with more than a fifth of all sexually violent crime in Ireland now being perpetrated by minors.
Truth #3: Our boys (and girls) are learning about sex from porn
By age nine, one in 10 children has seen pornography, according to a British report. By 11, it’s a third. By 13, more than half. They don’t go looking for it; it seeks them out. A $100 billion a year pornography industry targets them with its Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol and Baby Yoda pornographic content as early as it possibly can. Ninety per cent of free mainstream pornography (the kind being targeted at kids) is violent and misogynistic; it’s shockingly debasing, particularly to women. In a SPHE [Social, Personal and Health Education] class this year, some of my third-year students spoke about seeing choking and slapping portrayed as a normal expected sexual behaviour in pornography online. Like Jamie in Adolescence, they see online pornography as inevitable. “Everyone sees porn!” he says. He’s right; they do.
Truth #4: Boys are taught to seek sex but really need self-esteem
Manhood is still measured in heterosexual conquests – “Did you kiss/meet/shift/score her?” “How far did you get with her?” The sexualisation of social media has directly tied young boys’ sense of worth and self-esteem to how physically attractive they deem themselves to be. If they are not physically attractive, they are worthless. But in order to develop a strong sense of self-esteem in themselves, like all children, what boys really need is to be loved, held, nurtured, cared for, valued and validated in ways that have nothing to do with sex. But they learn – because we teach them – that vulnerability is weakness, that to be hurt is not masculine, to be cared for is feminine (and that’s bad), that men must be strong and dominant, because dominance makes them desirable. In Adolescence, someone – an adult male – needed to show Jamie love and care and affection before he hardened himself against being able to accept and receive it.
Truth #5: Boys feel hurt and upset and sad – they’ve just been taught to suppress it
Boys are just as susceptible to being hurt as anyone else. A boy upset at 13 feels the same sadness as a girl in the same situation. But whereas she might naturally cry, he’s learned that tears aren’t an option. Instead, sadness mutates into irritation, then erupts as anger. Recently, a group of male students I had taken into Dublin were caught acting in a misogynistic manner. When, due to the nature of the incident, the entire group was chastised by me for cultivating a culture whereby this could even be considered acceptable, the anger directed at me by the boys who considered themselves not to have been involved was palpable. Back at school with them the next day, it took an hour of discussion for them to recognise their true emotion: they were upset by what their peers had done, and they were hurt for having been reprimanded for contributing to the culture that enabled it. In Adolescence, no one has taught Jamie how to acknowledge his hurt, how to express his upset; the only recourse he has is anger.
A rare opportunity
A rare opportunity is occurring in Ireland at the moment to positively redefine modern Irish masculinity; our boys are crying out to know who we want them to become. The likes of online influencer Andrew Tate are rapidly and successfully answering this need with misogynistic hate masked as masculinity-championing empowerment at a time when young boys feel they are being raised by society to be one thing, only to then be told it’s toxic; no wonder so many millions flock to his call.
But something extraordinary happened in Ireland last year. The courageous actions of Nikita Hand in exposing Conor McGregor had an unexpected impact on the boys I work with. A civil jury found that McGregor raped Hand in a Dublin hotel (his appeal aimed at overturning the finding is expected to come before the Court of Appeal later this year). The boys saw what the rhetoric of Tate looked like when it was played out in real life and they rejected it. McGregor, who they once idolised, now disgusts them and they are starting to see the link between the rhetoric and the impact of it, but we need to rally around them in this work, to protect, support and lead them on this journey; we need to go on it with them.
There is one scene in Adolescence more heartbreaking than any other. (I couldn’t help but cry watching it.) It’s the scene where Jamie’s dad finally comes to terms with everything that he’s had to endure. The actor’s ability to express male emotional vulnerability as he struggles to let it all out after having been conditioned his whole life to keep it all in, and the personal turmoil that ensues in him, is almost unbearable to watch; it is so painfully recognisable.
“I’m sorry, son,” he weeps alone; “I should’ve done better.”
We all know Jamie. He’s a 13-year-old boy, he could be our 13-year-old boy; he’s really struggling to figure out how to be a man. He’s trying his best – he needs someone to hold his hand along the way and we need to be the ones to do it.
It’s time we all do better by Jamie – for him, for us and for everyone.
[ The concept of the alpha male human is cultural, not biologicalOpens in new window ]
Eoghan Cleary is a secondary schoolteacher and assistant principal at Temple Carrig School in Greystones, Co Wicklow. He is a member of the Online Health Task Force and serves as a director on the board of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. He develops and runs programmes teaching pupils about gender stereotypes, sex education and consent.
