The Left in Britain has become completely obsessed with Adolescence, a fictional TV show in which a schoolboy brutally murders his female classmate after being exposed to incel ideology online. The Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said we must tackle the “emerging and growing problem” the show highlights. And the Labour MP Anneliese Midgley has gone as far as calling for it to be screened in Parliament.
Meanwhile, the BBC has published literally dozens of articles about the show. In a particularly bizarre recent TV segment, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch was interrogated by two BBC journalists because she said she hadn’t watched it. When Badenoch explained that she doesn’t watch Casualty to know what’s going on in the NHS, she was met with the following response:
Do you stand by the thing that you just said about you comparing Adolescence with Casualty, these TV programmes? Did you really mean to say that?
It’s as if she drew a comparison between herself and Adolf Hitler. What’s so unreasonable about comparing two fictional TV shows?
Like Badenoch, I haven’t watched the show — but I get the basic premise. So how useful is it for understanding violence in Britain?
Let’s begin with crime statistics. The character who is murdered in the show is a 13 year-old white girl. Is this a demographic group with a high risk of being murdered? No. ONS figures show that, in the year 2023-24, there was a single murder of a white female aged 5-15. In the year before, there were four such murders, and in the year before that there were five.
But has the risk risen over a longer timescale — the last 10 years, say? The ONS does not provide a breakdown by age, sex and ethnicity, though it does provide one by age and sex. The figures show there has been no trend in the homicide rate for females aged 5-15.
The character who commits the stabbing is a 13 year-old white boy. Is this a demographic group with a high rate of knife murder? The ONS does not provide a breakdown by age and ethnicity, but we do know that such crimes are disproportionately committed by black males, rather than white or Asian males. According to the Mayor of London’s office, black Londoners comprise 61% of knife murder perpetrators, despite being only 13% of the population.
What about incel ideology — are its adherents particularly violent? Not according to recent research. Although there have been murders that were motivated by incel ideology, William Costello and David Buss find that “incels are not particularly prone to violence” and their “propensity for violence appears relatively low compared to that of the general population”.
Fortunately, crimes like the one portrayed in Adolescence are extremely rare in Britain, and to the extent that murders of 13 year-olds by 13 year-olds do happen, the show misrepresents the most likely ethnicity of the perpetrator. What’s more, research suggests that individuals who subscribe to incel ideology are not particularly violent. While the show may have a compelling narrative, it doesn’t seem particularly useful for understanding violence in contemporary society.
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Thanks for the info.
If one were being generous, one could say that from an artist’s point of view, it’s a bit dull and not very lucrative to do a dog bites man story, so you do the converse. That’s a pretty well known phenomenon at least in modern times. See every episode of Law & Order, the hugely successful and long lasting US TV franchise. This kind of thing is covered quite well in The Bonfire of the Vanities.
Perhaps there is an element of that here, but I suspect the overriding motivation is political.
I do not have positive feelings towards the people who made the show or those promoting it.
It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest that, given the hype surrounding it and the viewing figures, a second series is made. I haven’t watched it so no idea if it ends on some sort of cliffhanger, thereby having the potential for a follow-up, but certainly with Netflix it’s all about the popularity of a show. But I guess it’s all down to the writers, at the end of the day, whether they think there’s scope for another series or not.
I’ve not seen it. You could not pay me enough.
I’m sure they will be tempted to make another one as it seems to have got the “right people” talking.
They don’t need a cliffhanger ending these days to seek to make money from a follow up. Just look at Gladiator 2 which centres around the son of Russell Crowe’s character – you know….the one who was murdered first time round.
White boys are stupid crybabies who get abused by girls all the time except that they’re really extremely violent misogynists because of “the internet” who kill white girls all the time? That’s not a story. That’s the kind of mental diarrhea people wholly living in a woke echo chamber are wont to execrete through any bodily opening when given a chance to.
This is really a seriously foul smelling and acidic effluent Keir Charmless seeks to pour over wrongly coloured male children because he’s so madly in love with him.
I’m sure you are right. I expect watching it would make me even angrier than I already am.
A past article here provided a plot summary I’ve again summarized. There are two male protagonists, the one whose knife was used for the murder, who gets verbally abused and beaten by a girl in the school playground, and the chosen murderer who pisses his pants in fear when the police initially comes for him and whose motivation for the killing was that the victim taunted him over his lack of a sex life — still a 13 year old boy. That’s toxic masculinity for the chattering classes, an emerging and growing problem (Starmer) which needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.
I’d strongly advise against watching such a profoundly sick fantasy story because it’ll otherwise ends up programmed in one’s memory.
It beggars belief that the prime minister of the UK can apparently find no better use for his time than promoting this tripe and contemplating to force it onto school children.
Yup, sounds like utter bollocks to me. People of all ages and sexes do unpleasant stuff, and certainly 13 year old boys do their fair share, but this kind of thing is surely not typical.
What beggars belief even more is that so many people thought he might make a suitable Prime Minister – but I don’t have much to shout about, since I had generally thought politicians were vaguely competent and generally not malevolent, until “covid” confirmed my growing unease that they were generally a lot worse than I had previously believed.
I was 13 in 1985 which means I turned 13 in autumn of the year when I came into secondary school. I remember what we boys spent our time with at that time: It was either jumping around among a set of fairly large (compared to us) standing stones which required a special technique for each jump and landing, depending on the two stones in question, or kicking a tennis ball hard against a wall the next boy had to stop when it bounced back and kick it again against the wall. Boys who missed the ball had to leave the field until the next game started. We also spent a fair amount of time with running table-tennis, basically, running around a table-tennis table and whoever was at the small end had to pass the ball over to the other end. Again, somebody who failed to do so was considered to have lost and had to leave until a new game started. I don’t remember any girls partaking in this and they were certainly neither trying to give us a good hiding nor taunting us for our absolutely complete lack of a sex live we certainly didn’t regard as something we were particularly interested in it or – for that matter – knew anything about.
This is worse than utter bollocks. It’s deranged adults projecting their sick fantasies onto male and female children in order to justify teaching them the proper ways of RELATIONSHIPS AND SEX¹ (should really be blinking) long before they’d start to care for that themselves.
¹ Proper is obviously only LGBTXYZ23-14-31-honk-honk-honk and children who really don’t feel this way must be made ashamed of themselves because they’re EVIL OPPRESSORS AND VILE MURDERERS™.
Absolut zum Kotzen.
Yes I think we were pretty innocent at 13. From my personal experience, serious wrongdoing got up to by 13 year olds was mainly stuff like stealing and fighting – all pretty normal.
Very true but a lot has changed since 1985. One aspect that isn’t getting much airtime is a clear problem – social media based bullying. Sure bullying has been around forever but in my time it was far more physical and visible. My take is he was driven as much to hating the girl by her bullying of him.
Nobody who appeared in this story was driven to anything because it’s entirely a piece of adult-invented fiction. That’s also evident by the absolutely typical self-contradictory story line — white boys are pissy little wimps who routinely get kicked around by girls of the same age (ROTFL) but they’re also seriousy dangerous and totally sex-obsessed incel terrorists, all at 13.
This provides a panorama view into the minds of people who dream up stuff like this and it’s absolutely not pretty. Their apparent obession with illegal sex with children, camouflaged as illegal sex among children, should loudly ring a bell here. Foxes in charge of the henhouse.
None of what you wrote there was anything to do with social media bullying which neither you or me experienced as children.
I don’t care for your “But the EVIL INTERNET!!21” storyline because I’ve been – in all likeliness – on the ‘net for longer than you have known it to exist and this story is getting long in the tooth with regards to having gotten long in the tooth a while ago already.
Well just shows how wrong assumption can be. I was at university when you were 13 and using the forerunner of the internet – Compuserve, AOL and bulletin boards. I’ve used the internet from the very start and I’ve seen it evolve over my working lifetime. Recently not necessarily for good.
Some parts of the internet are evil – ever wandered into the dark web? Everything that humans get involved in has the capacity for “evil” (your word) and to deny its existence is a rather head in the sand approach.
Social media v2 in its current form has only been around significantly for ~10 years. As with every single form of media, it’s abused, usually for porn first.
I set-up a community Facebook group over ten years ago that’s now got 15,000 members. I see first hand how toxic even that can get at times and that’s used mainly by supposedly intelligent adults. Children don’t use platforms their parents use.
A friend’s daughter committed suicide a year or so ago. In her 20s. A tragic loss. She had her demons but her bf sharing explicit photos of her on social media was a big contributing factor. Her friend shared some of the social media bullying she’d received. Horrific.
So sorry if it offends you but evil does exist on the internet and most adults are completely unaware of how it’s going on with children. This generation of teenagers is the first generation to grow up with social media v2. It is creating new problems.
Not that I think Adolescence should be getting the airtime it is.
The Zealots That Be want you to watch a ‘narrative’ that bolsters their opinions – so it’s not entertainment but propaganda.
Who can doubt that if the culprit of “Adolescence” had been black, then anti-white outfits like the BBC and the “Labour” Party would be very, very, very, very quiet about it. For this reason, “Adolescence” is a form of neo-Zhdanovism. Andre Zhdanov was cultural commissar under Stalin whose job was to tell artists, writers, film makers etc to present the world not as it was but as the Marxist tyranny of the Soviet Union wanted to deceive the people into believing it was.
The facts are that the group which is disproportionately given to knife crime is not white, and that our anti-white “leaders” wish that that wasn’t the case. Hence the anti-white fiction of shows like “Adolescence”.
Exactly.
The Stalinist idea was that through propaganda (masquerading as art), the population can be trained to be loyal Soviet citizens. A kind of Pavlovian conditioning.
In a similar way, the purpose of films like this is indoctrination: divert attention from the real problems (such as Muslim extremism) and instead point the finger at some imaginary threat.
As observed in a Sceptic article last month, Legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news”.
Adolescence is merely the latest manifestation of media truth-twisting pandering to state-sponsored duplicity.
How Useful Is ‘Adolescence’ for Understanding Violence in Britain?
About as useful as A Clockwork Orange
Kier should watch the ‘documentary’ Four Lions.
It’s immensely useful to understand the attitude of the commentariat lording over us towards pre-teen white boys. These are to be vanquished with cruel kindness lest they turn into white men, something the prime minister calls “an emerging and growing problem”, in other words, technically, not a problem at all, but there’s a solution which strongly desires to get applied to it nevertheless.
How about a cutting-edge docu-drama about a young Muslim boy getting radicalized online, deciding to start a jihad against the West and blow himself up at a Taylor Swift concert?
Nah, silly idea. So far fetched from reality…
Or a black,muslim convert who attacks little girls in a Taylor Swift dance class.
We all see it,and I fear these repetitive stories are the early parts of a civil war that Professor David Betz describes.
I read an article about this yesterday (violent incel terrorists) and with 13, they’ve apparently chosen a pretty old protagonist despite I’m still wondering what kind of sex-life 13 year old boys are supposed to have. The boy the article was about supposedly got “radicalized into incel ideology online” at 11(!). This means the people behind this are convinced that 11 year old boys are naturally disposed to be violent misogynists seeking to dominate and harm women, the more so the less they’re sexually attractive to women which boys at the age of 11 certainly aren’t. This is a seriously sick ideology of people who hate white boys for them eventually turning into white men unless nipped in the bud before puberty. Which is, in my opinion, the point behind the TV show which is thus not-so-covertly about
grown-up womenadults (I put grown-up women there before remembering that Keir Charmless belongs to this group as well) harbouring pretty serious abuse fantasies about male, white children.Imagine that: The prime minister of the UK being instrumental in starting a serious abuse campaign targetting British boys supposed to take place in British schools. Is there anything about “England” Labour doesn’t hate? Meadows perhaps at least? Obviously not, as we already know that the British countryside itself is structurally racist.
While the show may have a compelling narrative, it doesn’t seem particularly useful for understanding violence in contemporary society.
No, but it is useful to deflect attention from the causes of violence in contemporary society. Given the breathless praise and attention given to this show, it’s also an example the progressives believing their own narrative about white males.
Sounds like some sick crap. Not my place to say but really you shouldn’t be watching television at all if you care about the sustenance of your soul. I mean the BBC Jesus Christ. You didn’t notice that they pulled a fast one over the last five years. If you didn’t notice then you are going to struggle in a demanding future. At best you will be someone’s pampered sex slave, at worst you will be packing someone’s chest freezer with your sliced up limbs in very short shrift. This is not your culture this is an attempt to pour acid on your culture and to give you cancer.
I did watch the clip of Badenoch on breakfast TV, and noticed that the female interrogator did refer to the programme as a “documentary”, so that’s obviously how she perceives it.
Those who own and control ‘ the state’ (government) are desperate to find an enemy to justify incanting the digital police state. They could do it at the flick of a switch but we, humanity, have to ask for it. Beg for it. That is how it works. If they just impose it on us they will reap eternal bad karma but if we beg for it they swerve that. That’s how the practitioners of the occult work. It’s called ‘revelation of the message’. Maybe I am a nutter. Maybe you don’t understand.
About as useful as Midsomer Murders.
ie a fabrication.
Like everything else nowadays create a problem that doesn’t exist in order to make laws to control the plebs. In this case the online harms bill. But it could equally be climate change, covid, war with Ukraine you name it really.
It’s safe to highlight violence and knife crime when the perpetrators and victims are from a majority ethnic group, in the hope that the message will be received by the ethnic minority group most likely to benefit . Or am I being naive?
The gang members knifing each other in the course of ‘discussions’ about control of the drug scene are not particularly likely to care about sex & crime stories which should really be considered unsuitable for children instead of manadatory for them. But that’s not the opinion of The Keir.
At least Muslims in this country pose no threat, unlike right-wing white racists.