Keir Starmer praised Adolescence. Now he needs to show he’s learned from it | Gaby Hinsliff
The government balked at protecting children from the perils of social media. TV has made the issues plain; now politics must do its job
It’s the story every parent of teenagers I know has been watching horrified through their fingers. The Netflix drama Adolescence starts with armed police breaking down an ordinary front door to arrest a 13-year-old boy for murder, in front of his bewildered parents. Though initially it seems there must have been some terrible mistake, Jamie’s Instagram account soon yields clues that all the adults – police, parents and teachers alike – had initially blundered past, oblivious.
Though talk of misogynistic “manosphere” influencers such as Andrew Tate hovers over the storyline, this isn’t really a story of radicalisation. What it skewers is the feeling of growing up very publicly in a world where sending nudes risks them instantly being shared round the class and everyone automatically films playground fights on their phones, and how that intensifies dangerous feelings of shame and rejection in immature minds. Over half of young women now say they’re frightened of their male peers, according to a sad little survey for the Lost Boys project at the Centre for Social Justice thinktank. What’s not always obvious is that beneath their anger, boys are often equally frightened of them.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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