After watching Adolescence do you think parents truly understand the dangers of online radicalisation?

[CeriMumsnet]

Adolescence has had us all talking since it dropped on Netflix, and with Keir Starmer now backing calls from Sir Gareth Southgate and Stephen Graham to tackle male violence and dangerous online influences, many of us are seriously thinking about just how toxic the online world is and what needs to be done to protect our children and teens.

We know Mumsnet users are deeply worried about what their kids are exposed to online, and they want more support from the government to deal with it. 70% of our users back a ban on social media for under 16s, and Mumsnet's Rage Against the Screen campaign is pushing for more action to protect our children.

We’re keen to hear from you about the extent to which you think parents understand the online world their children inhabit. Do you feel confident that you know enough about the dangers of online radicalisation?

Thank you for the link @Italiangreyhound I’m a huge fan of Laura Bates. She’s an absolute ⭐.

I think that parents understand the abstract idea that algorithms serve you more and more extreme content. But they don’t know what that actually means, that just by clicking ‘more’ you can end up watching beheadings without ever searching for that. In fact this great article explains it for porn: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/05/i-didnt-start-out-wanting-to-see-kids-are-porn-algorithms-feeding-a-generation-of-paedophiles-or-creating-one

At the same time I don’t think parents get to what extent kids social lives are online and that it’s the main sphere of socialising now.

You think that monster killed the little girls because of the internet? i'm sure he was already a.very disturbed creature and the internet gave.him a reason to let loose his demons.
What stops all the other thousands of watchers who view the same material as he did from going out and committing hideous murder?
Parental influence? Friendship groups? Area he lives in? Violent TV?
There are dozens of 'reasons' why a teenager
might expiode. None of them account for why one does and hundreds don't.

This, and I don't think all the pontificating posts about things like Adolescence help.
Not exactly supportive to the boys they're being derogatory about are they?
Calling them toxic, dismissive of their thoughts and feelings, making it clear how unimportant they are. Telling them how awful they are for feeling marginalised, discounted, worthless...

Many of these replies exemplify exactly how out of touch adults are with the way young boys are being infected by manosphere 'red pill' culture and toxic masculinity. If they play games online, they are hearing and absorbing these ideas and this language, if they watch streamers on Twitch or YouTube, they are hearing and absorbing this poison. Words like Chad, sigma, cuck - in daily usage across all demographics of young men and boys - are from this culture.

I live in a tiny village and boys from here who have grown up in an idyllic bubble and attended a cosy little village school are now in their early years of secondary school making "jokes" about women being able to put an end to rape if they just stop saying no, finding it harder to refuse sex with a dick in their mouth, needing to know their place and get back into the kitchen or bedroom... My DD is staggered by the things that come out of the mouths of boys she grew up with.

They are privileged children, with 'nice' parents and mothers who would drop down dead if they heard the ideas they exchange or read and looked at the images on their Snapchat messages. None of their families would see how the gaming setups they bought their sons for their bedrooms have opened the door for their indoctrination in misogyny and raised the risk of online radicalisation. Because they have no idea how these ideas take seed. They are oblivious.

Boys don't need to watch Andrew Tate or any old rapey men ranting about women, they are fed diluted versions of their ideas every single day in the jokes and banter of the streamers they admire, from the comments of their classmates and the voices of the gaming opponents in their ears. I think a lot of the deniers on here who are taking offence at Adolescence or ignoring it entirely should spend some time in gamers' spaces online. You would be surprised how few clicks it takes to arrive at pure toxicity.

I'd spend time with gamers if you would spend time with boys in real time. Boys have always talked tough (unless parents are about). Granted the talk now is lewder and nastier than it used to be,thanks to the internet, but for most it is just talk which they believe makes them seem more adult.
Machines can't make a boy into a murderer or rapist That.kind of boy has always been with us without any help from a computer or gamers
As @CaptainFuture points out, boys are constantly made out to be toxic; 'toxic masculinity' is a descriptor for the whole sex,
no word of praise for achievement or effort is allowed. If they are to be treated as a poison which runs through society, they will aspire to nothing, feel useless and worthless. And nothing can be further from the truth.

The point the show is making is that, for boys who already feel disenfranchised or those who have rage issues, family problems, poor self image etc. these ideas are dragging them down a rabbit hole which perpetuates their self-hatred and resentment and targets it towards girls and women.

The point I am making is that even so-called 'nice' boys are easily pulled down this slippery slope, so the Jamies of the world need early interventions to help undo these thought processes before they become truly destructive.

Using the show as an example, Jamie loved art but drifted away from it when his enthusiasm wasn't recognised or rewarded and then he 'failed' at the more stereotypically masculine pursuits his dad pushed him towards and nothing was offered to fill that void afterwards besides a gaming PC.

It is not anti-boy to say that there are horrible ideas and subcultures capturing the imaginations of a huge chunk of the younger generation and to want to see something done to course correct. Helping boys saves both boys and girls.

I have teenage boys in my home most weekends and throughout the holidays, my DD has always had lovely friends of both sexes. Her male friends struggle with the things they see and hear too. Toxic masculinity is a descriptor for a culture of behaviour and patterns of misogynistic thinking NOT a definition of boyhood or manhood. It harms ALL children.

TW. Potential for Triggering.
@FleaBeeBob i get that you see it as a good thing being shown in schools but playing devil’s advocate here I wonder what impact it will have in schools. Presumably it won’t have the shock factor it might have for parents because school kids no doubt are fully aware of social media influences etc the fact that the revelation to parents that watching porn is all very normal to that age range, will presumably hardly raised an eyebrow for school aged kids.
If the programme’s intended focus was indeed “toxic masculinity” I do think it missed the mark, even though all the commentary on it has only focused on that. Did it really go far enough to convince and explain what influenced him. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to believe that the boy’s father’s episodes of rage were to blame, it didn’t convince me. I’ve seen similar and worse behaviour in females.
In some ways having been the victim of SA as a child and knowing how that can in many cases lead to poor self esteem and self worth, my concern was actually more to do with the fact girls were sending photos of themselves to boys and 13yr olds were walking anywhere alone at night. I haven’t heard anyone discussing this aspect have you? The other thing I find odd is everyone’s completely ignoring the whole school environment, there’s no respect for teachers, telling them to shut up, with a hardly a glance back. Teachers clearly not being in control of their students and felt like an unsafe environment but that all seems to have gone by the by!!

I think the film’s other messages are missed if we take the murder of a female by a male as the only thing worth discussing. We didn’t know if there was any evidence the teenager was accessing the sort of content, like Andrew Tate but I think he was mentioned once, almost in passing.That’s why as I said before a court scene and evidence of his social and internet history to give some background to the murder, would have been better. All I got was that a boy murdered a girl for effectively bullying and ridiculing him. Did I miss something?

I wish they writers had kept closer to the real life stories that inspired the story, because fundamental root of black and desi online anti-female radicalism is very different compared to white boys and more dangerous.

Speaking from my experience many children of single mums who come from African or South Asian muslim or Christian backgrounds often get radicalised in real life by their own families and societies dismissing their mothers & social media is only ever a follow on from that.

If you think the problem is just social media, you aren’t paying attention.

This stuff has been happening for decades and every older generation just blames whatever they don’t understand rather than taking responsibility for the bits of society they have done nothing to address. Misogyny and the behaviour of teenage boys has always been a problem. Social media neither caused it not contributed to it.

@naanaa You missed the way that Jamie's red pill radicalisation made him only react violently towards the girl who rejected him and called him an incel for trying to take advantage of her once he saw her as "weak". Not the boys who called him an incel AND spat at him or physically intimidated him, the girl who said no and pushed back on Instagram.

You missed him snapping and calling the therapist a queen for 'dismissing' a male guard, looking around for someone to give permission for her to ask questions, despite her being the ranking professional in that environment and talking about how he could have sexually assaulted Katie because he had a knife and "most boys would have".

Boys were asking girls to send photos of themselves. Jamie was disappointed not to be able to see more images of 13-year-old girls topless after his classmate had been caught sharing them. He didn't feel gross or wrong for looking at the girls' bodies without their consent, he was cross that his access to such intimate photos had been cut off.

This is a good summary.

I didn’t feel the theme was particularly about radicalisation. Jamie was conscious that his lack of sporting prowess embarrassed his father. Jamie thought he wouldn’t get a girlfriend, he thought he was ugly. Katie had sent an intimate (topless?) photo to a male classmate, who circulated it. Jamie’s emphasis on Katie’s “flat chest” was awful (I was a flat-chested 13 year old too, my PE mistress ridiculed me in front of the class when I asked permission to go to the loo during a heavy, painful period, saying I was too flat chested to have started having periods).

No child should be roaming the streets late in the evening. No child should be sharing intimate photos of themselves, nor circulating them of others. No child should be carrying a knife, nor supplying one to a friend.

Jamie had confidence issues, and anger issues. I don’t think incel culture was entirely to blame.

@YourWinter I totally agree, I think incel culture just became an echo chamber for feelings he already had so (without familial or other support) he wasn't able to keep them in proportion or work through them healthily and come out the other side. The manosphere ideas he had absorbed online offered Jamie 'reasons' for the way he felt (the 80-20 rule, as an example) and helped amplify his fears that nothing would ever change.

It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I feel ugly; I am ugly; girls only like the top 20% of boys; I'll never get a girl the normal way; girls are bitches; preying on someone when she is weak is my only opportunity; Katie rejected me because she was a bitch; Katie let it be known that I was an incel because she was a bullying bitch; most boys would have touched her etc.

@BodenCardiganNot

That article is utterly terrifying to read.

Thanks for clarifying. Yes I did overlook those things and not being at all familiar with certain terms made it trickier. Making bold the “boys were asking girls” whilst that’s a problem in itself, I still worry that the bigger problem of why some girls then end up doing that, gets overlooked.
Boys may ask but not every girl would respond by agreeing. So that’s certainly something that needs further investigation.
Unfortunately it will come down ultimately to how girls see themselves, their self worth etc.their need to be liked or thought of in a specific way by boys. You only have to rake a quick look online to see who girls are emulating if they haven’t got strong self respecting female role models closer to hand. Just as boys who don’t have good male role models emulate those who are older teenagers or grown men like Tate who look like they’ve got it all but we know what they really are.

I agree about how disheartening it is to see young girls sending such pics. I do think that girls and women have been enormously damaged by contemporary online culture, too. By playing along with these requests, they're contributing to their own objectification. However, we do tend to turn pain inwards and behave in ways that harm ourselves. While so many men deflect their self-hatred by acting with hate towards others.

Well, this is well and truly a moral panic.

The show is not realistic, not one real life example matches the show and the stats show this to be wrong.

The writers get the pathology of a child killer totally wrong. Also those who research the impact of Incels (go watch the Women’s and Equalities Committee evidence hearing if you want some facts), initially were welcoming of it as an interesting drama but turned very negative when it became apparent that it was driving policy is a very counter productive direction.

There are good reasons to keep under 16s off social media, good arguments for restrictions on smart phones for the young but they are not the depiction of a story written by some middle aged men in TV circles imagining what is going on.

The adverse impact of Social Media id far more related to mental health outcomes and not that your child will turn in to a killer. Also girls suffer far worse MH impacts of social media than boys so this doesn’t even see the bigger part of the picture.

This panic will divert public policy from the real impact happening to kids. Some have even pointed out how the government response could drive significant negative outcomes.

I think, talking to local members of the community, Adolescence has really resonated with parents of colour because online radicalism of boys is something they're already battling. I wish the show had stuck closer to the original stories because seeing a white boy as a murderer dilutes the message massively. Online radicalism is something the black and muslim communities have battled the government to take seriously for a very long time.

I retired from secondary mainstream teaching a core subject (English) 4 years ago and many non-teaching friends asked “was it the behaviour? Is it getting worse?”
My response was always that I can manage naughty kids, I always have done, but I cannot manage the toxic masculinity in the classroom when the senior leadership don’t recognise it as a problem or as a priority.

I also thought the portrayal of the school was excellent. The "holding pen" comment from the policeman really reminded me of my son's middle school and we're not even in the UK. I feel like we've all got too lax about everything and maybe discipline and hard rules were not such a bad thing for adolescents.

Yes! It was an interesting watch but I just can’t see how it would work showing it in schools. It was very much aimed at adults. And when would the schools fit the 4ish hours to watch it all! The issues raised are valid and need tackling, but showing this long drama in schools isn’t going to solve them.

100%. It’s good to introduce those who may not already be aware to some of the issues present, but it’s not going to single-handedly end toxic masculinity or violence against women and girls. I find it strange that this drama has more people talking than some of the appalling real life cases this country has seen in recent years. Still, every little helps, I suppose!