In the Radio Times, Stephen Graham talks about writing the much-discussed Netflix television drama Adolescence:
“Where it came from, for me,” explains Graham, who co-created and wrote Adolescence with Jack Thorne (The Virtues, Toxic Town), “is there was an incident in Liverpool, a young girl, and she was stabbed to death by a young boy. I just thought, why?
“Then there was another young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop. And there was this thing up North, where that young girl Brianna Ghey was lured into the park by two teenagers, and they stabbed her. I just thought, what’s going on? What is this that’s happening?”
Graham here alludes to the killing of Ava White by the unnamed “Boy A” in Liverpool in 2022, and to the killing of Elianne Andam by Hassan Sentamu in Croydon in 2023. In both cases, an altercation with a girl in a public place escalated to the girl being murdered by a boy. The Brianna Ghey case involved a different dynamic, in which a boy and a girl in a Leopold and Loeb-type relationship pre-planned the murder of a transgirl as a way to satisfy sadistic impulses. Clearly, Graham was speaking very generally about some high-profile cases of youth knife crime in which the victim was not targeted as a boy (in GQ, Graham makes a distinction with “gang-on-gang violence”, although that shouldn’t be assumed as the context when the victim of a gang member is a teenage boy).
Graham’s reference to south London got picked up by Surrey Live, which published the headline “Netflix’s Adolescence inspired by true story of Croydon girl’s horrific murder”. This overstated Graham’s comment, giving the false impression that Adolescence was an adaptation of the Sentamu case. Bad actors on social media seized their chance: Sentamu was black, yet the killer in Adolescence is white. Was the drama therefore not an attempt to obscure black crime while vilifying the white working-class? (1) The false complaint that the show “race swapped the actual killer” was amplified in particular by Ian Miles Cheong, even though his assertion was made incoherent by his reference to “real life cases” in the plural (2).
Cheong also complained that the protagonist was portrayed as having been “radicalized online by the red pill movement”. Graham’s co-author Jack Thorne has discussed this in an article published in the Guardian:
At first, we didn’t know why Jamie, the perpetrator of the attack, did it. We knew he wasn’t a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive. Then someone I work with, Mariella Johnson, said: “I think you should look into ‘incel’ culture.”
I expected to be confronted by anger and aggression; what I didn’t expect was to quickly grasp the attraction of the so-called “manosphere”. I knew almost immediately that if I was an isolated kid, I would find answers as to why I felt a bit lost. One of the central ideas – that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men – would have made adolescent me sit up and, frankly, nod. The path then becomes: what do you do to upset that equation? How do you manipulate and harm in order to reset a female-dominated world that works against you? If you believe one part of the logic, the other half becomes conducive.
This, then, provides the context for the drama, rather than the specifics of the three cases cited by Graham.
Although not mentioned in Thorne’s article, the drama includes a passing reference to Andrew Tate, who has complained in a statement to Newsweek about being linked to the story. Some online comments about Tate were gathered by GB News under the headline “Andrew Tate fans flood Netflix Adolescence with backlash as they claim influencer is victim of ‘woke agenda'”; however, their round-up ignores aspects of this “backlash” aimed at Thorne in particular personally. On Newsnight, he noted that some online posters are falsely claiming that he is Jewish, or making comments about this appearance – it is claimed that he objects to masculinity due to being slightly built (something that can hardly be said of Stephen Graham).
Notes
1. Both authors of the drama are from working-class backgrounds. Graham refers to class in his Radio Times interview:
“I wanted him to be a kid from a working-class background whose parents were hard-working. You know, his mum wasn’t an alcoholic, his dad wasn’t violent, and he hadn’t been molested by his uncle. I didn’t want there to be a reason we can go, ‘Oh, well, we blame it on this.’ I think we’re all accountable in some way. We just wanted to throw it out there, ask the question why, and see where it lands. And if it can create debate within living rooms with people watching it with their families, our objective is completed.”
2. Cheong refers to “the Southport murderer” as one such case, even though the authors haven’t mentioned Southport or Axel Rudakubana anywhere (as far as I know). However, the parents of one of the children who survived being stabbed multiple times by Rudakubana recently referred to the drama in a statement that was read out in the House of Commons by Paul Foster MP:
“…We must support parents, caregivers and schools better, not only in how they identify and support young people who may be at risk to themselves or others—we can all agree that these pathways need overhauls, and the Southport inquiry will serve this purpose—but, before that, working with all children, establishing the fundamentals of healthy relationships, friendships, and girls and boys being equal.
Our young people must be exposed to counter-messaging from what they may be consuming online, or at home. The work required is vast and complex but the long-term reduction in knife crime will only be seen if we go back to the start and raise our children better.
In the context of violence towards women and girls, current topics are important. Netflix’s show ‘Adolescence’ has opened a conversation about our children’s exposure to harmful messaging and themes about women and girls. We are grateful for the coverage happening this week, which is further highlighting the terrifying impact of Andrew Tate and others on vulnerable young boys.”
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