Most people who have watched the new Netflix show Adolescence have been blown away by its gut-wrenching portrayal of the threats now faced by the parents of young boys. Most viewers will have oscillated between disgust and pity while watching a 13-year-old boy, Jamie Miller (played by Owen Cooper), whose views of women have been shaped by online influencers, admitting to killing a schoolgirl who rejected him.
The drama’s message is clear: it aims to tell the story of how some boys feel that unless they are good at football and having sex with girls, they are worthless – which makes them vulnerable. Online influencers tell them that the vast majority of women would never normally consent to be with them, and so, “you must trick them because you’ll never get them in the normal way”.
Yet, within less than a week, the drama has been dragged into a race row, exposing the hypocrisy of people who usually accuse others of “making everything about race”. The same individuals who mock concerns over cultural appropriation or complain that Hollywood casts too many non-white actors now appear to be arguing that having a white actor play the knife murderer is appropriating black culture.
Rumours have spread online that Adolescence is based on a real-life case involving a black perpetrator – supposedly turned into a white working-class boy by the show’s creators. This misinformation has been fuelled by figures like Joey Barton, and it did not take long for Elon Musk to ensure this false narrative reached his 220 million followers by commenting “Wow” on a similar post.
Little attention was paid to the fact that the creators and cast, including Stephen Graham, have explicitly denied that the show is based on any single story.
In an interview, Graham said the story draws from multiple cases of young boys stabbing girls to death in different parts of the country – cases that “hurt his heart”. “What’s happening? What’s going on with society today that we’re in?” he asked. “The internet is as much a teacher and a parent to our children as we can be. Do you know what I mean? And that was kind of where it came from.”
And therein lies the crux. The show’s creators should not have to explain any further because, ultimately, Adolescence is not even about knife crime.
The drama depicts a boy whose father failed to make him feel valued, leaving him vulnerable to figures like Andrew Tate. It highlights how many of these boys lack female friends and, therefore, do not develop empathy for the girls in their classes. Ultimately, it warns that we risk raising a generation of emotionally unstable boys who disregard women’s wellbeing and consent – and it shows where that can lead.
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Anyone whose main takeaway from this is “But why is he white? Why isn’t he black?” is missing the point entirely. I would go as far as to say that I am not sure they even care about boys, men, or the horrendous things we, as a society, do to women and girls. These critics are wilfully ignoring the message because their priority is pushing the idea that only black and brown people can be violent. It feels to me, they care more about that than about keeping women and girls safe.
I would go as far as to say that I am not sure they even care about boys, men, or the horrendous things we, as a society, do to women and girls
Certain people would like us to forget that Glasgow, a predominantly white city, had such high knife crime rates that it was only recently dethroned as the “murder capital of Europe”. Were the white boys involved in that crime appropriating black culture? No. Because, as BMC Public Health points out, poverty, childhood trauma, and inequality are the driving factors behind serious youth violence – not ethnicity. Scotland made significant progress in tackling the problem by treating it as a public health issue, recognising that these children were victims of a wider societal crisis and that carrying a knife was merely a symptom. By providing social and professional support, the country managed to halve the number of incidents.
The children in Scotland were treated as human beings. It was not assumed that their skin colour predetermined them for violent crime. Instead, real effort was made to address the poverty-fuelled desperation clinically proven to be the root cause. This level of empathy is rarely afforded to black children in our national discussions. That is not just problematic – it is illogical.
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We know that teenagers often turn to crime out of desperation to escape poverty. We know that academic studies have shown that even having a black-sounding name makes a candidate 80 per cent less likely to receive a callback for a job interview. That means it is even harder for many black children to escape poverty than it is for white children. Government data confirms that black households are the poorest in the UK.
The factors that push children into serious youth violence therefore act more forcefully against black kids than white kids – so logically, black children should receive more sympathy.
Yet somehow, had Adolescence cast a black actor as the boy who murdered a white girl, the conversation would have been shaped by the usual lens through which we view black children involved in knife crime. Ask yourself: do you think we would have seen the same level of sympathy for Jamie if he had been black? Would audiences have struggled as much to balance their compassion with their disgust at the murder of a schoolgirl? Or would they have simply reinforced racist narratives – making life even harder for black boys while undermining a critical lesson about protecting women and girls?
