Parents are up in arms. The Prime Minister’s decision to allow all state secondary schools to screen Adolescence, the scary Netflix series about a 13-year-old murdering a classmate for taunting him online as being undesirable, has parenting groups fuming.
Keir Starmer believes that showing the drama will teach adolescents about the dangers lurking online which are driving toxic relationships. Parents argue instead that the move risks subjecting school children as young as 11 to violent and sexual content. The roll-out has the potential to harm those children who have experienced similarly abusive relationships, alienating and retraumatising them. The content, they say, is age-inappropriate and messages misconstrued.
No matter how well-meaning, teachers cannot oversee a young person’s online engagement
These parents are right: this is no way to teach children about relationships. But not for the reasons they give.
One in three 11-year-olds admits to watching porn – and these days, that means almost inevitably violent images, with strangulation a routine if illegal practice. Contrary to the concern of parents, Adolescence is not normalising porn or sexual violence – that is already the status quo. As Baroness Bertin shows in her recent parliamentary review into pornography, there is increasing evidence that ‘choking is becoming a common part of real-life sexual encounters, despite the significant medical dangers associated with it’. Or think of what Laila Mickelwait, tireless campaigner against Porn Hub, found: ‘hundreds of pieces of evidence of sexual abuse’ including a man preying on homeless black teens.
Thought-provoking and compelling, Adolescence captures the brutal reality of today’s adolescents, who regularly visit a seedy underworld peopled by incels and girls who preach the 80-20 rule: 80 per cent of women go for 20 per cent of men. That leaves a lot of young boys feeling dangerously inadequate. ‘Lost’ boys can grow up to be killer boys: both Axel Rudakubana, who stabbed three little girls to death in Stockport last summer and Nicholas Prosper, who murdered his mother, sister and brother in September, spent their teenage years watching online violence. Adolescent girls fare no better: one in three, according to a University College study, feel unsafe in the classroom.
But Adolescence also exposes the alarming ignorance that parents have of their children’s experience – on and offline. Fathers and mothers who suffer their child’s locked bedrooms without daring to challenge them; parents for whom the emojis constantly shared among young people are like so many hieroglyphics; fathers and sons who never really speak.
This is the real reason the PM’s move will not serve his purpose. By proposing that schools show the drama as an educational resource, Starmer is allowing parents to dodge their responsibility. They can continue to live in la la land, pretending that their children spend their time playing hop-scotch rather than brooding over violent sexual images. They can continue to avoid conversations about sex, or explanations about consent, dismissing the first as cringe and the second as woke.
Instead, they will continue to palm off on schools the ‘tricky’ lessons about relationships: schools deliver PSHE, these parents argue. Surely one hour a week is enough to instill values like respect, empathy and compassion in relationships, right?
Wrong. Adolescence shows how, no matter how well-meaning, teachers cannot oversee a young person’s online engagement. Nor can they supervise budding friendships or enmities, rivalries or sexual experiments. ‘The view that it is for schools to pick up the baton on this is misguided,’ argues Julian Tomkins, a psychotherapist specialising in adolescents. ‘It lets parents off the hook when, in fact, what this drama shows is that this is a crisis parents must face up to.’
Setting boundaries. Constant communication. Routine and consistency. Validation. Parenting guidance is clear. But, as GK Chesterton said of Christianity, ‘it has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried’.
The terrible two tantrums and the teenage rage alike call for steely resolve and absolute unwavering confidence. Neither comes easily to parents who feel adrift in an alien digital culture. Mentoring and monitoring are tough roles for parents to play, but play them they must, from the very early years: ‘The relationships children need to help them navigate their teens are rooted long before they get their first iPhone,’ says Felicity Gillespie, CEO of Kindred2. ‘Strong familial attachments from birth lay the foundations for our social, emotional and physical development.’
A pity that watching Adolescence didn’t trigger a eureka moment for Starmer, leading him to ban phones from schools, or tackle porn content providers. But then, both are difficult measures to implement – and unpopular with Big Tech. Easier instead to force yet another duty on schools to perform. ‘In loco parentis’ now applies too often to too much.
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