‘Adolescence’ and the rise of Manosphere influencers — how radicalisation is shaping the next generation

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare — a teenage child doesn’t come home, and their body is found hours later. These are the harrowing but all too familiar circumstances that set up Adolescence, Netflix’s new four-part miniseries. The story, however, begins elsewhere with a scene plucked straight from another parental panic — riot police take a battering ram to the door of an everyday family home to arrest the owner’s 13-year-old son.

Adolescence immediately plunges into the harrowing events following the arrest of teenage Jamie Miller who is accused of murdering his classmate, Katie Leonard. The series, which is streaming now, has been lauded for its use of single-shot episodes that unfurl in real time, hurling the audience into the events with at-times uncomfortable intimacy.

Jamie sits frozen in his single bed as a SIG MCX rifle is pointed at him, when he stands up, we see he has wet himself — here is a child, being arrested for the most heinous of acts against another child, can this really be the world we are living in? Is the question viewers up and down the country have been asking, and the answer is yes. Just last week, Hassan Sentamu, 18, was sentenced to life imprisonment for stabbing Croydon schoolgirl Elianne Andam to death after she innocently attempted to help her friend rebuff his advances. That same week, Kyle Clifford was sentenced for the brutal murder of his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, her sister Hannah and their mother Carol. Though harrowing, these are not isolated instances: in the UK, a woman is killed by a man every 2.7 days.

As the investigation progresses, the story explores the impact on Jamie’s family, particularly his father, Eddie Miller, portrayed by show creator and co-writer Stephen Graham, and his mother, Manda Miller, played by Christine Tremarco. The series also introduces Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Detective Sergeant Misha Frank (Faye Marsay), who are pivotal in unravelling the circumstances that led up to the crime.

The show explores how platforms like Meta, TikTok, Snap, X, and Discord have become breeding grounds for extremism and radicalisation. Young and impressionable minds are being exposed to harmful content that can alter their perceptions of the world: research by the Online Safety Data Initiative revealed that 80% of children (aged 12-15) have had potentially harmful experiences online. As these digital spaces become more entrenched in our daily lives, it’s crucial to understand how and why this radicalisation is happening — and what can be done to protect the next generation from falling prey to dangerous ideologies.

Walters, a father of eight, told The Independent that the experience of filming the show left him in tears, “Every day I was going home, crying in my script. Rocking, you know,” he told reporter Jacob Stolworthy. The actor recently spoke about the need for young men to have positive male role models who are unafraid of their feelings and willing to show their emotions: “A lot of the problems that we’re facing is because young men are not willing to talk about how they feel because they feel it isn’t masculine,” said Walters in Joe Bloom’s Instagram art project, A View, from a bridge, in which passersby—and increasingly, activists and thought leaders—are asked to share their worldview into an old-school red telephone on a London bridge.

Adolescence explores the parental horror of what happens when you lose touch with your child’s world. In one scene, Walters’ Inspector Luke Bascombe has his theory about the relationship between Jamie Miller and the victim Katie Leonard completely debunked by his own teenage son, who explains that, for his Gen Z classmates, heart emojis mean different things depending on their colour. This revelation upends the detective’s understanding of the supposed friendship between the victim and the accused, but more than that, it highlights the gaping chasm between the generations.

In another heartbreaking scene, the Miller parents, grappling with the weight and horror of what their child stands accused of, try to console one another, reassuring each other that they did the best they could. Graham’s Eddie Miller recalls how they wrongly assumed that their son spending so much time in his room at home meant he was safe from the outside world. It hints, even if only slightly, at the isolation of today’s young boys and how toxic male influencers, like Andrew Tate—a looming presence in the show even if never mentioned by name—come in to fill the void left vacant by positive male role models.

“Men are suffering from loneliness and one of the big things that comes out of this online world is that the narratives are so confusing and so contradictory,” says Ben Hurst, a male ally and campaigner against toxic masculinity. Similar to Walters’ Instagram monologue, Hurst explains that young men are being taught that they shouldn’t rely on anyone, that seeking help is a sign of weakness, and that their struggles are caused by women. “I think all of that stuff leads to a real sense of loneliness and a real sense of isolation,” he adds.

This tracks with recent statistics that reveal the scale and severity of male loneliness: a 2019 YouGov poll found that one in five men have no close friends. More recently, a 2023 study from Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice found that the majority of men agreed with the statement, “No one really knows me well” and young men (18-23) were the likeliest to agree.

It’s a statement we hear Jamie echo to psychologist Briony Ariston, played by Erin Doherty, who is brought in to assess Jamie’s mental state, offering insights into his troubled psyche. In this episode, the male rage that has been alluded to comes out in full force as we hear Jamie parrot some of the violent ideologies he’s been exposed to.

It becomes clear how Jamie’s adolescent insecurities have been manipulated by Manosphere influencers and weaponised into a violent hatred towards women. Jamie’s teenage turmoil and confusion of modern boyhood have left him vulnerable to Andrew Tate-style characters, the type his dad, Eddie Miller, says he stumbled upon while looking for a workout video: “Look at that fella that popped up on my phone going on about how to treat women and how men should be men and all that shit, I was only looking for something for the gym”.

Though fictional, it chimes with Hurst’s insights about the wide reach of the Manosphere: “We can safely assume that most young people, to varying extents, have come into contact with it—whether that’s through TikTok, a Reddit forum or something deeper like Andrew Tate’s War Room.” The uncertainty of gender roles is often cited as a key factor behind Tate’s immense social reach. In a Kings College report that revealed that Gen Z boys view feminism more negatively than any other generation, Gideon Skinner, Head of Political Research at Ipsos UK, noted that while both men and women express some level of pessimism, younger boys and men “are more worried that life will be harder for them, and are more uncertain over male gender roles.”

Skinner’s colleague, Professor Bobby Duffy, Director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, voiced his concern about the dangers the youngest generation faces if this is “a new and unusual generational pattern” isn’t addressed, “We risk that void being filled by celebrities and influencers, and this nascent divide being exacerbated.”

Manda and Eddie belong to a generation that believes that if a child is at home they are safe, but as the story unfolds, they realise—all too late—that in today’s social climate the biggest danger to both young boys and girls can begin in the bedroom.