I just watched the four-part TV series Adolescence that has created quite a media splash. The show tells the story of a 13-year old boy Jamie who would come home from school and then spend all his time online on the computer in his room. The parents did not worry too much about this, seeing it as somewhat normal behavior, until he is charged with the knifing death of a classmate Katie. They are incredulous that he could have done this but, as the show unfolds, they discover that his world of peers in school and online has taken him down some dark roads. The parents, ordinary people who live ordinary lives and try to do their best to bring up their children well, wonder where and how they went wrong and how they could have missed all the signs that their son was being influenced by others who were feeding them ideas that led to dangerous feelings of inadequacy and grievance.
The show makes a point of noting how adults are oblivious to what is going on in the world of adolescents and even when they know, misread the signals. This is shown in a scene where the detective’s son tells the father that he is blundering ineffectively because he does not understand the nuances of emojis, and that those emojis that he thought showed a liking by Katie for Jamie were actually sarcastic.
It is Mascombe’s own son, Adam, (Amari Jayden Bacchus), a recalcitrant kid, Fredo’s favorite target, who gets his father to understand his own ignorance. “It’s not going well because you’re not getting it,” Adam explains. “You’re not reading what they’re doing, what’s happening.” He shows his father a comment that Katie posted on Jamie’s Instagram. “Looks like she’s being nice?” Actually, the boy explains, the emojis she uses are coded ways of denigrating Jamie, of calling him an incel. “Adolescence” lives in the paranoid world that Andrew Tate made.
The show deals with the world that nurtures ‘incels’, the term for ‘involuntary celibates’, young men who feel that a few attractive men are sought after by all the desirable women, leaving them with few or no partners, and the deep resentment and miysogyny that this breeds. I have written before about the dark and hostile mentality of the incels that has led some to commit acts of murder but had thought that they consisted of older males. This show argues that this happens at a much younger age than I thought and the young boys in the show toss around the oft-quoted statistic that 80% of women are attracted to just 20% of men as the reason why they do not have girl friends. They think that to get them, they must use trickery by making girls feel inadequate and vulnerable before approaching them.
Here’s the trailer.
The series is quite extraordinary in that each of the four hour-long episodes is done in a single take and hence all the action in an episode takes place in real time. This is so even when the scene shifts from one place to another, as when people get in and out of cars, walk through a large police station or in a school, going from room to room up and down stairs, all followed by a single camera. The single-take techniques adds to the dramatic effect but requires split-second timing by everyone and thus multiple takes to get right. There is also some extraordinarily good acting by the young people, especially the debut by Owen Cooper playing Jamie who had to do an hour-long scene.
Each of the four episodes is one continuous take. In the first, playing out here before my eyes, 13-year-old Jamie (played by newcomer Owen Cooper) gets a knock on the door at his house. Police officers pile in and the boy is arrested for murder. His father Eddie (Graham), shocked and bewildered, joins Jamie in the police car on the journey to the police station.
The house, a real location, is just minutes away from a studio, where the production team have built an entire walk-through police station set. The camera follows Jamie and Eddie in the car – it is literally passed through the window at one end and passed out again when it arrives at the police station – and then the cameraman walks backwards as Jamie is led to be checked in and charged.
…Making one-shot television requires meticulous planning and oversight. Barantini and his director of photography Matthew Lewis … ran the movements of the camera and the performers again and again until it became muscle memory. For each of the four episodes they gave themselves a week for cast rehearsals, another week for tech rehearsals and then a third for the shoot.
On one occasion the camera stays with the action even when it is in a classroom and a boy jumps through the window, runs through the school lot, across a street and into an alley, pursued by a policeman, and then goes up to get an aerial view. I’m not sure how that was done unless it was a hand-held camera inside the classroom that was then passed seamlessly through the window and then attached to a drone outside that could then keep pace with the runners and then rise up into the sky.
Jack Thorne, the writer of the show, discusses how he came to deal with this topic after reading about murders committed by young boys and why, as a result of the research he did, he will not give his son a cell phone until he is 14.
Thorne is married to the comedy agent Rachel Mason, with whom he has a son, Elliott, 8. He will not, his father hopes, own a smartphone until he turns 14. “I don’t think I’m brave enough to say, when 70 to 80 per cent of his class have got smartphones, no, you need to be isolated. I don’t want him to be isolated like that,” Thorne says, rubbing his head thoughtfully with his palms. “But it will never be in his bedroom until he’s old enough to cope with what it is to have that instrument in private.”
…As research, Thorne spent many hours in the “dark corners” of the online manosphere “and as soon as we opened that box, it made sense of everything”, he says. “I realised how attractive the philosophy it promotes is. It did shock and unsettle me, and it did worry me about my nephews and my kid. It made me want to put him in a box and keep him there for the next ten years.”
…“That idea of solving this problem by creating better role models for men, that will take 20 years,” Thorne argues, “whereas there are certain things that we can do overnight that could help. I would ban smartphone sales up to the age of 16. Why do kids need smartphones? They can have phones — but not smartphones. It would work like cigarettes. And slowly they do what Rishi Sunak did to cigarettes, which is to say: eventually no one’s going to have them. But certainly keeping kids away from smartphones in whatever way possible, I think, is vital.”
…Adolescence did not start life as a story of masculinity and misogyny. “It started with Stephen talking about knife crime,” Thorne says. Graham, his frequent collaborator, had noticed — and been disturbed by — the growing number of knife attacks by young men on young women.
A female colleague suggested that he look at incel culture. “And I had always dismissed incel culture — I thought they were people that shout loudly but don’t really have an impact. And then I started really looking into it,” Thorne says. “I said, ‘OK, I’m a 13-year-old boy and I hear [a false statistic quoted by incels] that 80 per cent of women are attracted to 20 per cent of men [known as ‘the 80/20 rule’]. I hear this culture is female-dominated and this culture is perverted by female minds. And that your job [as a man] is to get fit, get strong and harm and manipulate because that is the only way you are going to be successful.
…Graham, who has two teenage children of his own with his wife, actor Hannah Walters, was adamant from the outset that the story shouldn’t play into stereotypes. “I wanted him to be a kid from a working-class background whose parents were hard-working. You know, his mum wasn’t an alcoholic, his dad wasn’t violent, and he hadn’t been molested by his uncle. I didn’t want there to be a reason we can go, ‘Oh, well, we blame it on this.’ I think we’re all accountable in some way. We just wanted to throw it out there, ask the question why, and see where it lands. And if it can create debate within living rooms with people watching it with their families, our objective is completed.”
This 80-20 rule started out as a statistic by a 19th century Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who found that approximately 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population. Others then found similar patterns in other areas and it soon bloomed into a generalized 80-20 rule called the Pareto Principle that states that “for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes”. This rule is assumed to have validity even in situations where there have been no rigorous studies to support it. This is especially the case when it comes to its use about 80% of women being attracted to 20% of men since the evidence proffered in support is highly dubious. And even if it were true, so what? Would anyone be shocked, or even consider it noteworthy, if the genders were reversed and it was reported that 80% of men are attracted to 20% of women? Yet we do not hear of female incel groups creating a culture of toxic femininity and killing boys/men or shooting off guns into crowds.
Jordan Peterson is someone who leans heavily into the 80-20 rule as an all-purpose explanation in his appeals to the ‘manosphere’, the world of alienated young men who feel that society is conspiring to shut them out of its rewards, economic, social, and sexual. It feeds into their sense of grievance and allows them to place the blame for their failures on others, that they are being unfairly denied what they rightfully deserve, This is a toxic attitude that can, and does, lead to violence against those whom they feel are unfairly depriving them and not recognizing their true worth.
Their whole argument starts to fall apart when you realize that most people do end up in relationships. 69% have partners and of the 31% who are single, half of them are not looking for one. So only about 15% of people are looking for partners and have not found one. What these incels are complaining about is not that they cannot find partners, but that the few people that they see as desirable will not drop everything and run to them when they crook their fingers. That is a grotesque view of relationships that denies all agency to women. Rather than being deprived of what is rightfully theirs, these boys and men have a strong sense of entitlement and this, more than anything, is likely what makes them repellent. They would do well to be more introspective about their problems and change themselves.
I would be willing to bet that most of the boys/men complaining about being rejected have also rejected perfectly nice people who were attracted to them because they were not the status symbols or trophies that they sought. They seem to not realize that girls/women also face rejection because rejections are part of life. Over 50 years ago, Janis Ian beautifully captured the ache of female adolescent rejection in her song At Seventeen. But women seem to be acculturated to suck it up and there do not seem to be female influencers urging them to take umbrage and lash out the way there is in the manosphere.
There has been a lot of attention paid recently to the question of “What is wrong with boys today? How are we failing them?”. The rise of the manosphere and the toxic masculinity that is promoted so much by people like Andrew Tate is undoubtedly cause for concern. This Guardian editorial spoke about this problem and what might be done to address it.
Boys used to be raised by their parents. Now, as they grow up, an increasing number are coming under the influence of toxic online figures who push a hollow, misogynistic version of masculinity. This isn’t helping their character or their relationships. But it does work for a digital world where worth is measured in money, status and appearance. Girls have long seen their mental health suffer from social media comparisons and phone addiction. But that doesn’t make it any less troubling now that boys are being similarly affected.
In his Richard Dimbleby lecture for the BBC, Sir Gareth Southgate made a cogent case that young men are being failed by modern society – not just by absent role models, but by a culture that doesn’t acknowledge failure and vulnerability while exposing them to damaging digital influences. Without real-life guidance, they can withdraw, becoming reluctant to talk or unable to express their emotions. Boys can fall into an unhealthy world of gaming, gambling and pornography.
This void, the former England football manager warned, is also being filled by “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers whose sole drive is for their own gain”. They trick young men into believing that success is measured by money or emotionless dominance.
…Apple’s iPhone arrived in 2007. Mobile social media apps followed, offering access and unimaginable connections to a new generation. But they didn’t just change masculinity – they monetised it. Instead of mentors, boys get marketers; instead of guidance, they get grifters; instead of role models, they get algorithms.
But one could also be rightly concerned about the fact that girls are portrayed as if they are doing just fine and do not need much attention. Indeed, in this show, they are largely portrayed as a backdrop to events with only one scene in episode two in which a girl vents her frustrations at the way that the death of her best friend Katie is being viewed. Shannon Keating argues that this show fails to address the girls’ side of the incel equation.
In the second episode of Adolescence — the new acclaimed Netflix limited series and runaway hit about a 13-year-old boy accused of murder — Detective Sergeant Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) tells one of her male colleagues what upsets her most about the case. She and Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) are visiting the secondary school previously attended by the accused killer, Jamie (newcomer Owen Cooper, who was only 14 at the time of filming), and his classmate Katie (Emilia Holliday), the girl he’s accused of killing.
“You know what I don’t like about all this?” Frank says. “The perp always gets the front line: A man raped a woman. We’ve been following Jamie’s brain around this entire case. Katie isn’t important; Jamie is. Everyone will remember Jamie; no one will remember her. That’s what annoys me. That’s what gets to me.”
It’s an astute observation, and perhaps a self-critically meta one, given that the show in which Frank is saying these lines is devoted entirely to Jamie: what he did, why he did it, and who’s to blame. Meanwhile, the person whose life he’s extinguished is relegated to a briefly shown photograph of a smiling girl in a baseball cap, some comments on social media, and a teacher who remembers she “talked a bit too much.”
Adolescence tells a frightening story even though it has no blood, gore, violence, or suspense of any kind. It is terrifying, especially for parents of young children, simply because of what it reveals might be going on in their lives that parents have no inkling of, and how they might be going along a path that could lead to dangerous outcomes. As a parent, I felt a sense of relief that my children grew up before social media became an all-consuming part of children’s lives but I can definitely empathize with parents of children now struggling to protect them from toxic influences on the internet.
It will take more than actions by individual parents to deal with this problem. I think that the idea of banning access to cell phones to people under 16 (only allowing access to stripped down phones that can only make and receive phone calls) might be a good start, since it will relieve parents of peer pressure, feeling that they are the only ones restricting their children. We already do that with other things that are deemed dangerous or unsuitable for children, such as cigarettes and alcohol. Then getting a full-service cell phone will simply become one of those rights of passage to adulthood like getting a driver’s license. Getting such a change will not be easy. The tech and social media companies will fight it tooth and nail because they want people to get hooked on their addictive products at a young age, the younger the better. They will egg on young people to resist the move, arguing that it infringes on their freedom.
But the tobacco lobby also was powerful and was defeated. The social media tech lobby can also be vanquished with concerted action.
US laws are very friendly to con artists and liars, because banning their methods would negatively impact advertisers and politicians. likewise, any nazi-ass rethuglican looking at the bumper crop of young men they’ve harvested will realize this came from letting youtube and twitch raise them, and will work against efforts to curtail that.
“On one occasion the camera stays with the action even when it is in a classroom and a boy jumps through the window, runs through the school lot, across a street and into an alley, pursued by a policeman, and then goes up to get an aerial view. I’m not sure how that was done . . .”
I haven’t seen the shot, so this may be totally wrong, but in an episode of Stargate SG-1, a cameraperson using a Steadicam walks backwards onto a platform attached to a camera crane (he was guided by handlers holding his waist) and is then lifted into the air.
(Continuing my thoughts @#2)
The window could have been built into two sections of moveable wall that pull apart after the actors have jumped through, leaving a large passage for the cameraperson to easily run through.
I feel like there is an ancient-Greek-prophecy trope or something going on with the young incels, where they feel/fear women aren’t/won’t be attracted to them, so they then adopt behaviors that ensure women won’t be attracted to them…
@lochaber, you might be on to something. When I was growing up, something my parents used to advise us kids was to “be your best self”. This has nothing to do with the vapid “live your best life” or the First Paid Escort’s “be best” initiative that lasted a day, but instead the idea that people have good and bad traits and the way to smooth social situations was to lean on the good ones.
Incels, on the other hand, often are their worst selves: ungroomed, nasty, vicious, and entitled. The pool of women who would be attracted to that and *also* look like a supermodel, adore being a sex slave, and have eyes only for the incel has to be very small. But the incels feel they’re owed only the most desirable women.
My kids are adults now, and when they were young, we fought the cellphone battle. All their friends had smartphones with unlimited data, and they were all always fighting and bullying each other using their phones. Once my kids got their driver’s license, they got flip phones that made calls and could text. And, indeed, one called me once after a car accident. They both bought themselves smartphones with college graduation money. We had an XBox and a desktop computer, but they stayed in the living room. The tech at the time was the iPod, which downloaded but otherwise didn’t provide connectivity.
The existence of influencers is such a weird thing, and it’s dismaying how many are enthralled by vapid personalities doing stupid and dangerous things..Then there are the “manosphere” influencers who are enticing young men to abuse and kill women.
Online influences drive girls to harm themselves.
Online influences drive boys to harm girls.
***
Melania Trump is an odious woman, but “First Paid Escort” doesn’t help the discourse at all, using sex work as a pejorative.
I think to accept the incel pitch you have to accept two core ideas and never, ever look at them closely.
1. People have ratings and that’s kind of all there is to it. There’s no romance. There’s no other value to another person. Just that rating and nothing else.
2. There are no other people. You’re the only person worth considering (and presumably other people in your movement). Everyone else is just some object. Either a tool for your use or an obstacle in your way. This is kind of a requirement if you’re going to treat the small part of you that is your sex drive as more important than half the population.
I vaguely recall hearing dumb racist and mysoginist things growing up pre-internet. They always felt off. I didn’t necessarily understand what was wrong with them but I knew they were wrong. But I think it was because I’d already been singled out by some people who asserted various things about me which were very inconvenient for me and quite convenient for them. So hearing about how a bunch of people with X quality also have some completely unrelated sounding Y quality just didn’t work for me. But the production values and degree of polish involved would have been much lower.
I would like to say I am just an inherenty good person who could never have fallen for this sort of thing. But I fear that the reality is that I was taught by harsh experiences of being on the other end of similar nonsense. When you have a thorough experience of something it’s much more difficult to fall for a line of BS about anything similar.
Kids these days -- I just wish I could sort out how much of my worries about them, and about the world in general, derive from getting older and how much from actual degradation of society and physical realities.
Also, please allow me to register a futile protest about the word “incel”. I see two such sub-populations (within the young cis-het male population): the more visible one, as described in this post & comments, and one -- much like myself at that age -- unable to get dates or relationships with girls/young women due to both personal failings and social barriers, but realizing that only self-improvement (and perhaps someday cultural reforms) could help. Lumping both sets together with the same word not only adds to the burdens of the latter, but actively drives them into the toxic arms of the former.
The parents, ordinary people who live ordinary lives and try to do their best to bring up their children well, wonder where and how they went wrong and how they could have missed all the signs
The signs were right in front of them and no they did not even come close to doing their best.
13-year old boy Jamie who would come home from school and then spend all his time online on the computer in his room
First up -- how was it done? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG9XUSnK9g8
Although to me all the technical trickery in the world isn’t as impressive as casting a first time child actor, expecting them to carry an hour of television in a single take, and having it actually work at all, let alone be as good as it is.
Fun fact: the word “incel” was coined by a woman, and originally meant women specifically who “couldn’t get laid”. Oddly, none of the women involved were ever lambasted for their sense of entitlement, because it’s more culturally acceptable for a straight woman to expect high standards for a man. Then again, none of these women went around shooting the place up, either, so there’s that. But “18-30 year old man gets violent” isn’t a news story, it needs a hook to sell it, and “incel” is a usable one.
And where does that come from? I grew up immersed in a popular culture that was steeped in what we now call toxic masculinity. James Bond, Rick Blaine in Casablanca, Charles Foster Kane, Michael Corleone, Rick Deckard, Han Solo, Indiana Jones… hell, it’s possible to put together a pretty comprehensive essay about toxic masculinity in movies using just films starring Harrison Ford.
https://popculturedetective.agency/2017/romance-according-to-harrison-ford-movies
Boys grew up being told, over and over and over again, that the world owes them the prom queen, or the cool girl, or whatever -- that that is the happy ending. Usually there’s relatively little agency attributable to these female characters -- they’re often barely characters, they’re the reward. It’s why so many movies from my youth are now “problematic”. But to complain about the “problematic” nature of these things, and not even for a moment consider that maybe they’re the reason you’ve got a problematic subculture going on seems wilfully stupid. Simply blaming young men for being bad people for feeling bad about themselves is hardly focussed thinking.
Also, culture used to be more changeable, because movies from the fifties weren’t like movies from the sixties, which weren’t like movies from the seventies, which weren’t like movies from the eighties, which weren’t like movies from the nineties…. except, actual change in culture seems to have slowed almost to a stop. Can you even think of anything quintessentially 2015? Try 1985, or 1979, or 1968, or 1958, and you should be able to come up with something, but 2015? Something that’s definitively of that time that’s no longer in its moment… fidget spinners? (That was 2017, I think…) It feels like we’re in a long now, and all the problematic movies of the past haven’t gone away, because the techbros have made sure we can watch them all, right here, right now, if we want to. And sure, there might be a cringey title card saying “Yeah, sorry, this movie is super racist/sexist/homophobic, but it was 1984, yo!”, but in general nothing apart from “Song of the South” has actually vanished. The present is now not just today, it’s today and every day before, if you want, with all the horrible misogynist homophobic racist stuff that was acceptable in the eighties. That’s what the young are swimming in. Entitlement doesn’t just come from watching Andrew Tate videos.
This is technically correct. The bit in italics is doing a lot of heavy lifting, though. If you’ve not seen female influencers loudly taking umbrage and lashing out, I envy you the feed the algorithm is giving you. They just tend not to resort to literal physical violence most of the time, so they don’t get into the headlines, because (whisper it, this is a heretical opinion in 2025) women are different from men, and process and express their feelings differently.
See, there’s a female equivalent to everything. In this case, every time a story in a film or whatever focuses on a female character, or Bod forbid a formerly male character gets recast with a woman, you can rely on at least one misogynist prick to turn up with an opinion which can be stereotyped as “but what about teh menz?!”. And this is that, but for teh wimminz. And the answer is the same here: this story is this story, told the way it is told because that is what this story is about. Don’t like it? Fuck off and make one you do like. If I had a daughter, and she’d been killed by some boy, and the police spent their time focusing on her and making sure her experience was foregrounded, I think I’d be justified in asking what the woke fuck they were doing, and to get their heads out of their arses and focus on catching and convicting the perp, because that is literally their job.
My boys are already learning about respect, consent, equality and compassion. They have weekend-only access to heavily-regulated devices to play games under supervision. Right now I’m thinking they’ll be 14 before they get a smartphone of their own… although who knows what the social media world will look like eight years from now?
I can say I’m not looking forward to the inevitable conflicts over this, but I have a supportive wife whose profession involves dealing with kids who’ve come a cropper in a variety of ways (few of them even anywhere near as extreme as this, but there’s a wide spectrum) so we’re about as well equipped as anyone could be…. I hope.
What a time to be alive.
sonofrojblake @10:
How much of this is because girls have different experiences and different socialization from boys?
I was a more-violent-than-average girl, mostly because I wasn’t taught to ‘process and express my feelings differently’. As a child I got into fist-fights with my brother, with boys on the playground and in the street, occasionally with girls. I stopped when I realized I was going to lose very consistently. Processing and expressing feelings doesn’t come naturally. These are learned skills, and I appreciate that schools these days are making the effort to teach them.
“…because it’s more culturally acceptable for a straight woman to expect high standards for a man.”
Is it, though? It’s not just incels complaining about women having standards, period, and there is a LOT of push back against small, simple standards like putting your dirty dishes in the sink, doing a load of laundry every so often, or even just spending some time together (I’m looking at you, man caves). It’s not a high standard to expect a man to spend some time with the kids without calling it “babysitting”.
And what about the women with high standards? He has to make a good living? Gold digger. Whore. He has to be fit or good looking? Stuck-up bitch. There are a lot of gendered slurs that are used against women. The gendered slurs used against men? They’re either comparing the men to women or calling them gay, which itself stems from misogyny.
@ ^
This is just anecdotal, but I so often see hetero couples where the guy is a slob in jeans and a t-shirt and the woman is done up to the nines. I don’t buy, “it’s more culturally acceptable for a straight woman to expect high standards for a man”.
@ sonofroj
This is a bizarre reversal of causality where movies create social attitudes rather than reflect them. So… why were these movies made with theses attitudes in the first place. *chin scratching emoji*
@ Tabby Lavalamp:
Also,
Under patriarchy, everyone loses. It’s just that women always lose so much more than the men because the men are taught they are owed everything and if they’re not, it’s perfectly okay to go berserk and kill.
Also, I stand by my Melania comment because indeed, she was working as a paid escort when she met Trump. That was likely her whole reason for being in the USA. It’s not a slur against sex workers, it’s just the facts.
@Silentbob, there was a trend in American popular tv comedies for chubby, unattractive (by tv standards), barely-functional men to be married to smokin’-hot women who had high-paying jobs. She wasn’t with him because he was a provider (he was not), she wasn’t with him because he was nice to her (he was not, nor was his family when the plot called for his family to be around), she wasn’t with him because he was good with their kids (he was not). The message seemed to be that any guy could get himself a trophy woman, but women had no right to expect a man who was in any way good to or good for them.
As someone with a very active interest in menswear, this absolutely matches my observations. It’s sufficiently unusual for (straight) men to make any real effort in this department that strangers in the street will compliment you on it if you do, and it’s an instant point of bonding for us whenever we encounter each other. So yeah, I guess I’m not sure what “high standards” means in this context.
Oh yeah, and a disappointing number of men will break out the homophobic slurs against any man who takes obvious care in his dress or grooming…
Katydid @#15,
When I read your comment, I immediately thought of Family Guy.
Silentbob @14:
Oversimplification. Movies (and other art forms) both reflect and confirm/perpetuate.
This is just anecdotal, but I’ve never found people (men or women) who spend a lot of time on their appearance very interesting.
Yesterday I wrote a screed as a comment to this, but decided to not post the entire thing. It’s probably better that way. However, I will submit some of the highlights of my thoughts and results of some research I have done.
To begin with, let me say that I agree with Pierce R. Butler @8, although I’d add that there is a third confounding factor, and that is how much the media is paying attention to any particular issue on any particular day. Now, a few points.
1. Adolescent violence, particularly by young men, has been recorded almost as long as records exist. There are references to it in the writing from Ancient Greece. That does not make it right, but it makes blaming it on the internet somewhat difficult. I’m old enough to remember personally when adolescent violence was blamed on Dungeons and Dragons. Historically, it has been blamed on anything culturally new, as a few examples; Women’s lib, marijuana, rock-and-roll, Elvis, jazz, rag-time, side-burns, the waltz, tobacco, troubadours, and we could probably go all the way back to the discovery of fire.
2. The FBI statistics show that violent crime associated with adolescents has been trending down since 1993. I.e. prior to smart-phones and prior to widespread adoption of the internet. The fact that arrests have been steady or even going up has been attributed by some researchers who study juvenile crime to be related to more aggressive policing. That is, the police are more likely to prefer charges than previously, which tracks with other evidence we’ve seen of more authoritarian police forces.
3. Researchers in juvenile crime also suggest that there are two forms of juvenile offenders. Those who will always be aggressive, cruel, and scofflaws, and those who grow out of it by the time they are in their 20’s. Again, the vast majority of youths who engage in petty crime (as opposed to violent crime), stop doing so by the time they are in their 20’s. The ones who continue are (typically) those who were more violent as adolescents, and in fact, identified as more violent even before adolescence. Some studies of violent youth crime suggest that those individuals who are violent pre-teens, which is a small fraction of the population of adolescents who commit violent crime, those individuals may commit up to 50% of violent adolescent crime.
4. There are as many theories of the causes of adolescent violence as of general crime. Several which get thrown around suggest that the parents are at fault, i.e. parenting style. Another proposed explanation is that the child has fallen into bad company, i.e. peer pressure. The studies I found tend to show that at least with male adolescents, peer pressure was a stronger link to adolescent rebellion/violence/crime than parenting style. Some studies suggest that with female adolescents parenting style may be a larger factor. I found nothing to explain this discrepancy, it could certainly be cultural. But with the full knowledge that I might get a response telling me I’m wrong, I will say there might be a genetic component to it. I don’t know, but in the absence of data I could find, I don’t think I can rule it out. Someone better informed may provide more data.
5. Other theories about the causes of adolescent violence abound. Poverty is a common suggestion, as is poor education. Some researchers suggest that a child in a poor neighborhood would join a gang for protection, and then be coerced into crime. I suppose you could call that the Fagin theory. One of the more common ideas, which I think has some merit, is that adolescents are learning the social boundaries of adulthood, i.e. adolescent rebellion is a natural condition. The limits of the child’s behavior is no longer being set by their parents, but by society and their peers. Much as a two-year-old will test the limits with their parents, the thirteen-year-old is testing the limits of adulthood.
6. A quick note about parenting style. Dr. Laurence Steinberg, who is acknowledged as an expert on adolescence, appears to believe that parenting style is more important than other factors in helping to prevent adolescent violence. He promotes this view in this book, Adolescence. Maybe he is doing so because that’s one thing which parents can control. It is probably impossible for a parent to control all other factors which may influence an adolescent’s behavior, like; friends, enemies, teachers, television, and internet personalities. However, as mentioned above, Steinburg has to be aware that some studies show that parenting style really has little to do with adolescent violence. Even if the parents are aware of some warning signs in their children’s behavior, they may have little ability to alter it. That has got to be frustrating for a lot of parents, and parents should do what they can. They should not, of course, condone or encourage violence. The recent reports of parents thinking they can mitigate violent tendencies in their children by giving them the tools to commit greater violence is somewhat disheartening, but even adults can be foolish.
7. The Guardian opinion piece in the OP strikes me as not helpful. The main tone of the article appears to come from Sir Gareth Southgate, who is a football (soccer) coach, with apparently no formal training in education, psychology, or adolescent behavior. Sir Gareth Southgate is a very good coach and a well respected man, there is no doubt about that, but his qualifications to speak about adolescent psychology seem to be bit limited. I am not certain I trust him when he claims that “… an increasing number [of boys] are coming under the influence of toxic online figures ….” That toxic on-line figures exist I do not refute, but how do you determine that they are increasing in popularity among adolescent males?
So, to sum up, adolescent violence has been going on for a long time, it’s hard to blame the internet, or rag-time, for it’s existence. It’s the extreme end of the adolescent rebellion behavior which most people go through while growing up. Most people grow out of it. Those who don’t grow out of it are usually those were were violent prior to adolescence. While all violence is inexcusable, we should be wise enough to make a distinction between the two populations. I am not saying that, “boy’s will be boy’s”, some of this behavior is probably the adolescent establishing adult boundaries, so punishments for violent behavior are warranted. Similarly, we can make a distinction between incels who are unwilling to learn that society doesn’t exist for their benefit and those who eventually find someone to be with. The internet didn’t invent these types of people either, although it may have exposed them to a larger audience. But as we all know, just because someone has an audience that doesn’t mean the all the audience agrees with them. Note that there are people who are celibate voluntarily, and they should not be lumped into the incel population.
Okay, so this may still be another one of my (boring) wall-o-text comments. But, trust me, it’s still far shorter than what I wrote yesterday. I also have been trying to let others speak before I post one of these, not so as to get in the last word, but because a wall-o-text in a comment thread can be a discouragement for more general conversation. Even if I have my own opinions, I do enjoy reading the comments from everyone else. At times I even change my opinions because of them.