Warden’s Thoughts on … Adolescence
Hands up if you have watched Adolescence. If you haven’t you probably should, if only so that you can have an opinion on it and be part of the debate that is being engendered about the issues that it raises. Really important issues about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a parent. It is a fine drama, but, more importantly, it may be a watershed moment, which is not something that can be said very often in a world where there are endless new productions being released every week on a myriad of platforms.
I am not going to tell the whole story but, put simply, it is about a 13 year old boy who murders a girl from his school who has mocked his masculinity on social media. Although he is the perpetrator of a brutal crime, he is also a victim, conditioned by the online world which he and his friends inhabit and where he has been manipulated by bad actors who churn out filth and lies about what it means to be a real man. I had not heard the word ‘manosphere’ before but I did know what an ‘incel’ was and everyone has heard of Andrew Tate and his like. You get the context.
The most moving part of the series is the effect it has on his mother and father and sister. His parents are ordinary people who have done their best to raise their son and keep him safe. They thought he was safe in his bedroom, staying off the streets, but were totally unaware of the virtual world that he was living in. The portrayal of the father is incredibly moving. I guess the parents are also victims, bringing up their children in a very rough world without the emotional tools to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis (look it up).
I have heard it said before that as parents we find it easy to protect our children in the physical world: how do you cross a road, how do you learn to swim, don’t talk to strangers, wash your hands before eating. Those things are easy and obvious and you would despise a parent who didn’t teach their child these basics. On the other hand, although they can avoid getting hit by a car, we have allowed our children to access a jungle of online influences without imposing any parameters, thinking that the online world was safer than the physical one. We were wrong. Left to themselves it will be no time before children (I used that word deliberately) are watching violent pornography, extremist political or religious content and material designed to get them to question their identity and feel bad about themselves…we know where that leads. And all the while algorithms, developed by the cleverest people in the world, feed them with content that encourages them to develop more and more warped views on the world…or on women.
As a school we have a major responsibility to educate the children here and to put in place rules and guidelines to protect them. Obviously, this is of particular importance for the younger ones. We need to teach those ones how to cross the road or to stay away from the road altogether. Education is better than the imposition of rules, so that we teach young people how to make good decisions, but rules are necessary here, just as they are at home. And rules need to be reviewed, as they will be.
This responsibility is shared with all their parents, who are the ones to buy the phones and other devices to put them into their child’s hands. They could always make the decision not…or to delay. Nowadays it is possible to monitor exactly how much online time they can have, which apps are on their phones and which websites can be accessed. How many parents are actually doing that? Day schools can ban phones and that is a no-brainer, but I wonder how many parents impose their own strict rules at home. Most children go to a school where they spend a maximum of eight hours a day, five days a week. What about the other 75% of their time? And that is term-time only.
Perhaps Adolesence is the wake-up call that society needs as a whole.
How can we change the narrative…what should it mean to be a man at St. Columba’s? It is always better to focus on the positive than dwell on the negative. That is a discussion that I would really like to have.
Image credit: Netflix
