the series everyone is talking about touches on a collective taboo
We talk about regulation, introduce screen time limits and digital literacy — yet we have little idea of the online currents and voices shaping children’s everyday lives.
Hailed by British critics as a technical and aesthetic triumph, Adolescence broke records within two weeks of release, becoming one of the most-watched miniseries in Netflix history. Created by actor Stephen Graham and writer Jack Thorne, the show has reignited debate about the “Andrew Tate effect” and the growing sense of adult powerlessness and abdication of responsibility in relation to children’s digital ecosystems.
The series is inspired by real events — including the murders of Elianne Andam and Ava White, two British girls who were stabbed to death by boys their own age. “There’s an epidemic of knife crime amongst young, young lads … up and down the country,” Stephen Graham told The Hollywood Reporter.
According to the latest UK government report, Knife Crime Statistics: England and Wales, under-18s make up a growing share of perpetrators in knife-related crimes. Nearly one in five offenders in cases of knife possession is a teenager between 10 and 17. The report documents how violence and knife culture are increasingly entering adolescence — often long before the adults around them notice. 59 percent of these young offenders are sentenced to community service, while only 6 percent receive prison sentences. This reflects a judicial system trying to strike a balance between punishment and early intervention.
But the question Adolescence insists on asking isn’t just who should step in — it’s who even notices when things start to go wrong. How do we detect the warning signs when we live in parallel realities — adults and children — separated by algorithm-curated generational bubbles? The series points to a collective failure of care. It reminds us that the adult generation — the ones with power and responsibility — is lost in translation when it comes to the language kids navigate online. And that disconnect comes at a cost.
As British author Hayley Campbell put it on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Must Watch: “It’s bringing it up, it’s looking at it. It’s about the rise of misogyny, especially in young boys, brought about by people like Andrew Tate, who’s namechecked in this, but only once. It’s not about him. The drama is more about the horror of how little control you have over your kid and what they’re doing on their phone.”
Extremism at Child’s Height
Around the same time, a British report on online radicalization was released: “I’m not super familiar with children’s ecosystems online”: Expert Assessments on the Effects of Early Childhood Exposure to Extremism Online. The title itself—taken from one of the interviewed experts—highlights the core problem: understanding children’s exposure to extremist content online requires us to view it as part of a broader digital ecology, where responsibility is distributed and constantly negotiated.
Based on eight semi-structured interviews with experts, practitioners, and policymakers, the report stresses that children’s encounters with extremism cannot be reduced to individual choices or intentional manipulation. Instead, they must be understood as the outcome of a complex interplay between technological design, algorithms, cultural figures, and social dynamics. Especially within social media and online gaming, the influences are not necessarily sought out—but rather flow in through recommendations, memes, voice chats, or user-generated content.
The digital environment functions as a hybrid space, where offline vulnerabilities—such as social isolation, marginalization, or the absence of secure adult relationships—are transformed into online attachments and identities within communities that often elude adult oversight. The report highlights the need to rethink responsibility—not as something purely individual or structural, but as something that unfolds in the tension between platform design, social relations, and children’s own developmental conditions.
Experts particularly emphasize online misogyny as a so-called “soft entry point”—a gateway into extremist spaces, where children mimic language and behavior without fully grasping their meaning. For the youngest users, especially those under 14, it is rarely about ideological alignment but rather memetic behavior and algorithmic exposure: they repeat what they see and hear, and gradually their “moral resilience” is worn down.
The experts point to a number of structural issues in the tech industry, including poor age verification, limited algorithmic transparency, and insufficient moderation. They recommend long-term solutions like safety-by-design instead of reactive measures. At the same time, the report stresses that not all children exposed to extremist content will necessarily adopt extreme views. A more nuanced approach is called for—one that protects children’s rights and perspectives and recognizes that they navigate digital environments they had no say in shaping. But all of this has long remained a conversation about the future. What about the children growing up now?
Graham and Thorne wanted to understand the roots of rising violence among very young boys—and the role of online culture, incel communities, and figures like Andrew Tate. As Thorne put it in a BBC Radio 4 Front Row interview, the show’s main character has been indoctrinated by “voices a lot more dangerous than Andrew Tate’s.” Adolescence doesn’t pose simple questions of guilt—it opens up a broader conversation about algorithms, isolation, and the search for meaning and belonging, which can be exploited by extremist communities.
The show reveals that even children from loving, attentive homes can be at risk of radicalization. But more than anything, it emphasizes the element of surprise. It’s not necessarily the absence of care, but the lack of connection between adult experience and children's reality that creates the space where extreme ideas can take hold. The series seeks to make that gap visible—and the silence that can arise in its wake. It addresses a collective blindness to how online culture is shaping children’s language, worldview, and sense of self.
Adolescence doesn’t show us anything entirely new. What’s new is how it embraces the complexity. It portrays the harsh consequences of adults failing to understand the digital ecosystems children inhabit—as parents, as professionals, as experts. The series points—both subtly and sharply—to how adults have given up in the face of that very complexity. We regulate, impose screen time, and put digital literacy on the school curriculum—but we still don’t know which currents and voices actually shape children’s lives.
The teachers in Adolescence, including Mr. Malik (played by Faraz Ayub), personify a broader crisis: well-meaning adults left with nothing but symbolic gestures in a digital world they no longer understand. He represents the quiet powerlessness that emerges when guidance is reduced to rules, while the deeper realities remain out of reach.
The series doesn’t just challenge parental responsibility—it quietly implicates us all. Experts, educators, child welfare professionals, and policymakers are, in different ways, adrift in the same boat. Across the often polarized debates—about screen time, smartphones in schools, and digital literacy—there’s a shared blind spot: a fundamental uncertainty about how to meaningfully intervene. That is what unites everyone across these heated discussions. The generation in charge is lost. And while that comes at a cost to children, it remains the tech industry’s strongest card.
This is the challenge Adolescence dares us to face. To ask not just how we lost control—but why we stopped trying to understand.