You don’t have to watch Adolescence to learn from it

Warning: Contains spoilers

As soon as I read about Adolescence, the hit four-part Netflix series, I knew I probably wouldn't watch it.

A 13-year-old boy violently murdering his female peer is not something I can unwind with at night. I have a young son and I don't need anything additional turning me into a weird, frantic parent trying to stop him from encountering any evil.

But the show has sparked a global conversation about young men and I want to learn from it.

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The creators of Adolescence describe it as a "whydunit" rather than a "whodunit". Viewers know from the first episode that 13-year-old Jamie Miller murdered a girl from his school and the remaining episodes unravel how he got there while leaving some unanswered questions. The issues raised are not scripted imagination. They are real.

A good chunk of the unravelling focuses on the "manosphere" — the anti-feminist corner of the internet that promotes masculinity and often misogyny with its unofficial leader Andrew Tate. Being bullied in real life and online is a factor for Jamie, so are those old teenage foes — low self-esteem and loneliness.

One of the chilling elements of the show is Jamie's parents. They seem rather normal and loving, doing their best. Jamie's dad, while having a bit of a temper, was not violent towards Jamie like his dad was to him. In other words, Jamie could be anyone's kid.

"I had this almost panic about the world and young men and then I realised I was overreacting," said an Auckland mum, who watched the series with her 13-year-old son.

"He knows I get a bit wound up. He's like 'Don't. It's good. It was a great series, but that's not me' and we had a really good conversation about it."

But she wasn't surprised by the show. Her son was aware of Tate, the manosphere and its coded language from around the age of 10. While her son says he appreciates Tate's views on fitness — Tate is a four-time world kickboxing champion — that's about it. However, some of his peers at school entertain the social media influencer's other views, including that women are lazy and never truly independent.

Rather than ban phones or influencers in the manosphere, the Auckland mum has chosen to be curious rather than condemning it or whatever else her son is circling.

"It made me completely commit to these more difficult conversations regularly."

Make yourself a safe space for your teenager, advised Dr Claire Meehan, a senior criminology lecturer at the University of Auckland who studies the intersection of young people's digital and sexual lives. She has watched Adolescence twice and appreciated the show's nuanced approach.

"Just have these conversations in a non-confrontational way. Even if they do something that shocks you, try not to react..."

That goes for teenage girls as well, says Meehan, pointing to the example of Jamie's victim Katie, when she sends a topless image of herself to a male classmate. That image is shared without her consent to others, an example of revenge porn.

"They're afraid to speak to an adult about it because they're afraid of the response or 'Oh I told you so.'"

From his research into masculinity, Dr Kris Taylor knows that young people want to talk to adults about these difficult subjects, "but they are often dismissed".

"Come in, work through understanding what the world looks like [for them], and from there you can move on.

"But don't come in and try to lecture them and say, 'Oh, if you're seeing bad stuff on the internet, just delete your Instagram' or something like that, because that's not going to be conducive to conversation."

The old trick of talking to them side by side in the car really does work to reduce the confrontation of a face-to-face setup, said Taylor.

Adults tend to propose simple solutions to problems that are complex for young people, says Taylor.

"What we need to recognise is that social media and phones and so on have fundamentally changed access to information and also the ways that peer relationships can work."

"We need to be conscious of that, that banning phones and so on can also be detrimental to teenagers' social worlds, their ability to find information, and so on."

Meehan is in favour of restrictions rather than bans. These restrictions might include no devices in bedrooms and parenting controls on smartphones.

Richie Hardcore, a Muay Thai champion turned social advocate in the masculinity space, has been described as "the anti-Andrew Tate." He pointed to Australia's attempts to ban social media for under 16-year-olds as something New Zealand should pay attention to.

"Phones are here to stay, so we need to regulate them, delay the onset of social media, but also learn to help our young people use them safely, right? It's like driving."

Jack Thorne, the creator of Adolescence, called for a ban on smartphones until teenagers turn 16.

A telling scene for Taylor, the masculinity researcher, came in the fourth and final episode of Adolescence. That episode focused on the impact of Jamie's crime on the family and the community.

In the scene, Jamie's parents discuss where they might have gone wrong with their son. The father noted how he pushed his son to play football and take up boxing with hopeless results that the dad found embarrassing. Then, the parents talked about how Jamie loved to draw, something that might not be considered a traditional masculine interest.

"What's interesting to me about that is that they didn't take him to art class... his expressions, his interest in art was perhaps not as rewarded as it could have been because it doesn't fit with the sports mindset of his father.

"I've had young men tell me this all the time, their relationships with their fathers have suffered because they haven't been interested in rugby..."

It's important because of what research shows about extremism, says Taylor. If young people can have a passion, one thing they are good at, it will be a major key to helping them avoid radicalisation.

Harcore regularly speaks in high schools and has been asked by principals to specifically mention and address Andrew Tate (and there are many other "leaders" in the manosphere).

That online world "radicalised Jamie and turned him into a young man who acted out on really sexist beliefs with an inability to control his anger and emotions," says Harcore.

Taylor is constantly impressed with how young people "can talk through some of these things in quite nuanced and sophisticated ways".

Their critical media literacy already exists, but it's possible to develop it further. This means acknowledging they are mature enough to understand complexity and not taking their first answer, which is typically a clique response they know you want to hear, says Taylor.

Ask open-ended questions that start with:

Why...

How...

Describe for me...

Tell me about...

"When they recognise that what we actually want to hear is their thoughts and opinions, and nuanced takes, and the difficulty of this situation, they come out with all sorts of ideas."