Netflix’s “Adolescence” | The Illustrated Empathy Gap
The Netflix series “Adolescence” was irresponsible in promoting a distorted perspective on knife crime in the UK. In every respect the series was grossly misleading as regards the empirical evidence on knife crime. The creators were Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham and it was directed by Philip Barantini. It centres on a 13-year-old schoolboy named Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) who is arrested after the murder of a girl in his school. Graham plays his father in the production.
The production companies behind Adolescence were Plan B Entertainment, Warp Films and Matriarch Productions. Plan B Entertainment is Brad Pitt’s production company, founded in 2001 by a team including Jennifer Aniston. Brad Pitt is reported to be in discussion with the film makers over producing a second series. I dread to think where that might take us.
The principal character, Jamie, was a white boy who was doing well at school and had not been in trouble with the police previously. He was from a stable two-parent family, living in a decent neighbourhood. The parents were portrayed as an average, decent, working-class couple with the father in regular self-employment as a plumber. There was no indication that Jamie was other than well-adjusted, with no sign of mental ill-health. He appears to have had a reasonably good relationship with his parents and sister. In short, the killing came from the least expected quarter. Indeed, this is probably the cause of the hysterical reaction to the drama. If this lad could suddenly become a killer, it could be your son next. This is why its so pernicious.
UK official stats tell us little or nothing about offenders in knife crime cases, and nothing at all about whether the offenders against female victims tend to be male or female.
Care must be taken when interpreting knife crime statistics because merely carrying a non-folding knife or a knife with a blade longer than 3 inches is a crime, and most of the knife crime statistics will not distinguish between carrying a knife and using it to stab someone. The majority of knife crimes do not involve the knife having been used.
Further care must be taken when interpreting knife crime because the statistics generally refer to “non-domestic” knife crime, i.e., excluding domestic stabbings within the home. That is rather important because female perpetrators typically account for a larger proportion of homicidal stabbings within the home than they do outside the home (though generally the minority in both cases). Moreover, female perpetrators of domestic homicide are far more likely than male perpetrators of domestic homicide to use a knife (see Brown et al (2022) and references therein).
Let me emphasize that the rest of this article, and the data quoted herein, refers to non-domestic knife crime only, but it should not be forgotten that this is only half the story.
In the first Appendix, below, I include what stats I could find, the key points being as follows.
About 8.7% of stabbing victims are female, about 13.1% of knife crime offenders are female. Like other forms of non-domestic violence, knife crime tends to be male-on-male.
Non-whites are about 5 times more likely to be knife crime offenders than whites (though whites account for most knife crimes due to weight of numbers). Non-whites are also more likely to the victims of knife crime, by a similar factor.
Only about 4.5% of knife crime victims are under 16, so the story of “Adolescence” which associates this age range with the problem is misleading.
In short: white male adolescent offender and young white female victim is the least common combination in knife crime. The probability of the plot of Adolescence diminishes rapidly still further when the personal and familial characteristics of Jamie are taken into account.
Of course, there are individual cases of males stabbing young girls, that of Rudakubana being the most nasty recent example.
But I’ve not seen anything to link “the manosphere” to knife crime, this being arguably one of the propaganda targets of Adolescence. Rudakubana was arguably influenced by online sites, but Islamist in nature, not the “manosphere”.
My initial suspicion, before watching the series, was that the motivation behind this rather nasty series was to propagandize the UK public into support for even more draconian censorship laws – with “the manosphere” being particularly targeted. The recent Online Safety Act was not draconian enough for many of the usual suspects. However, after watching the series I see that “the manosphere” theme was not presented very forcibly and was only one of several potential motivations for the killing. Another theme was the father’s explosive temper, which the scene with the female psychologist revealed was shared by the boy, Jamie. But that is actually even worse because it centres Jamie’s motivation on masculinity itself, the same narrative that has been poisoning our culture for decades. Either way it can only be seen de facto as the blackest propaganda, whatever the writers intended.
Lamentably, the public lapped up Adolescence and have fallen 100% for the propaganda. One despairs.
Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, in a revealing Freudian slip, referred to the series in Parliament as “a documentary”. Consistent with that false perspective he has concluded that there must be a need to tackle the “emerging and growing problem” raised by the drama. That its narrative aligns with the ideological prejudices of the Labour Party is rather convenient. Starmer has even hosted a meeting with the film makers in Downing Street. At his suggestion, the series has been made free to all secondary schools….as if it were a public service broadcast.
No, it is a deeply divisive public disservice broadcast.
Whatever the writers intended, the controllers of the popular narrative are insisting that the drama shines a light on the corrosive impact of social media and misogynist influencers on teenage boys. Some even claim that it motivates a need for a reform of parenting or a reform of schools. All this is based on a fictional story which is wildly empirically unlikely to the point that – as far as I have yet seen – no one has identified a single case quite like it, and certainly not one motivated by “the manosphere”.
As far as I am aware, the film makers have only suggested one case might be similar to that depicted in the drama, the stabbing to death of Brianna Ghey. Why have none of the sources which refer to this case not mentioned that Ghey was killed by two people, one of whom was a girl: Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe. The judge, Mrs Justice Yip, said in her summing up that Scarlett Jenkinson had a fantasy to kill, that she had lured Brianna to the park, and that it was acknowledged that Scarlett Jenkinson had been the driving force behind the plan to kill Ghey. And yet this case is being quoted as motivating Adolescence and the resulting hysterical targeting of the “manosphere” and/or masculinity itself – motivating, that is, a fictional character in a fictional and grossly atypical scenario.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, whilst the country has been obsessing over this dramatic misdirection there was a very disturbing event at Elm Park School in east London on 22 March 2025. This was an attack on a private 16th birthday party by a gang of 50 youths, high on nitrous oxide, who were wielding knives and at least one machete. Reports do not specify the ethnicity, but here is a video. Two males, aged 16 and 19, were stabbed and rushed to hospital.12 people were arrested and the police are looking for more.
The nearest real case to that of Adolescence that I’ve found was the stabbing to death of 15 year old Holly Newton by her ex-boyfriend Logan MacPhail, then 16. Another boy intervened and pulled MacPhail away but was himself badly injured. MacPhail is reported to be of low intelligence, autistic and with a speech impediment. He had a history of self-harming with a knife, had previously taken an overdose and on another occasion had been “found on a bridge”. He was apparently from a violent home in which the social services were involved. So, not really very like Adolescence, then.
The deeply pernicious aspect of Adolescence is that it creates a worry in parents that their son, despite perhaps being apparently a paragon of good behaviour, could be turned into a murderous monster at any moment by the influence of the “manosphere”, or perhaps just due to his intrinsically toxic masculinity. That there is no evidence for any of this is not the message being promoted, and the usual culprits are enthusiastically whipping up the hysteria aided and abetted by senior politicians and (real) influencers. Could there perhaps be ideological or political motives behind this reaction, irrespective of the film makers intentions?
What this reaction to the drama implies is a willingness to further partisan (and corrosive) sociopolitical objectives by burdening every boy in our society with a guilt he does not deserve. It is obscene.
Interestingly, that “Adolescence” is anti-male propaganda is evident even to AI engines. Tom Golden has already blogged on this. We have rerun chatGPT ourselves, and also Grok-3. The results are fascinating and spot-on so I attach them in the second Appendix.
I conclude that the public are distressingly gullible but that the AI engines are not. AI emerges with credit, in this case at least, but only rotten tomatoes for the public.
