The little murderer in Adolescence, a 13-year-old boy, is drop-dead gorgeous. Absolutely to die for!

Not that his victim thought so. A school classmate, she had spurned his faltering efforts at dating her (“I’m not that desperate”, she told him). Nor is he impressed with his own looks (“I’m ugly”). Humiliated, feeling he will never make it with girls, he confronts her in a carpark. CCTV footage captures him in what seems to be an angry verbal tirade before we see a knife in his hand. He stabs her again and again, killing her in an “incel” fury.

The searing emotional impact and crackling dramatic tension of this four-part Netflix series undoubtedly justifies the numerous rave reviews. But there were a few critics. Some complained that all the attention was on the perpetrator, none on the victim, emphasising his humanity and suffering at the expense of hers. Others protested that the narrative simplistically put all the blame on social media and misogynist influencers such as Andrew Tate.

A more compelling question for Heretic TOC, though, is why this series has been invested with such huge importance, treated by numerous commentators, including Keir Starmer, as though it were a fact-based drama, almost a documentary, like that other big hit, Mr Bates vs the Post Office. The answer, I suggest, bears a surprisingly strong connection to my opening remark about the boy’s attractiveness. Only a shameless nonce like me would talk openly about fancying him, but millions of viewers will also have been influenced, consciously or otherwise, by his angelic appearance.

I am reminded of  Alan Kurdi. The name may not mean anything to you now, but if you were following the news ten years ago you will probably recall a harrowing photo of a two-year-old Syrian toddler pictured dead on a Mediterranean beach. He had drowned along with his mother and brother. They had all been trying to reach Europe in a dangerous boat crossing as refugees from the civil war in their country in 2015. The tragic fate of little Alan, whose family had been among thousands of others fleeing a desperate situation, caught the imagination of the western public and media like nothing else.

The media at the time had been largely hostile to these refugees, who were seen as an invading horde, an impersonal mass of foreigners threatening to overwhelm our communities and either live off state benefits or steal our jobs. But just one single image of one dead child suddenly cut through all that. Alan was too real to ignore. Indisputably an innocent victim, he was also a highly relatable one. Looking well-dressed and cared for, he could have been the much-loved pride and joy of any western parent.

Bluntly, he also looked like a white boy – neither too black nor too poor to be seen as Other, which would have dulled our emotional response because, rightly or wrongly, we do tend to feel charity begins (and perhaps even ends) at home, with our own tribe, our kith and kin. It is  a sentiment JD Vance tried to justify recently by citing the Catholic theology of Ordo amoris (order of love), only to be put in his place by Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, who told him firmly he was wrong.

It will not have escaped the attention of those who saw Adolescence that the young killer, “Jamie”,  is white. That alone, for most British viewers, will have said he is “one of us”. As such, he is seen not as a monster but as just a vulnerable child with emotional problems crying out to be addressed with sympathy and understanding, an impression reinforced by his physical slightness.

Played with extraordinary conviction by Owen Cooper, who looks much younger than his 15 years, Jamie lacks for nothing in terms of loving parental support. The drama focuses mainly on his father, “Eddie Miller”, being put through the wringer of emotional trauma. Dad is the one tasked with going to the police station to be with Jamie as he is taken through the evidence against him. He sees the damning CCTV footage but is desperate to accept his son’s claim it has been faked. Eddie doesn’t tell Mum what he has seen, shielding his wife but leaving the full weight of the awful reality on his own shoulders, a reality that sees him agonised through a grim sequence of classic trauma reactions, starting with denial and progressing through anger, depression and grief over the blighted life that will inevitably be his son’s future as a convicted murderer.  Stephen Graham as Eddie, does surely award-winning justice to a demanding role.

A recurring theme in the Comments at Heretic TOC recently has been whether subjects are off-topic for this forum if they have only a remote connection to youth liberation or MAP concerns. Adolescence is obviously on-topic, but the question of Jamie’s whiteness and its implications quickly takes us much wider, onto less sure terrain. In my keenness to avoid the negative side of identity politics, in which white is set against black, males against females (BLs against GLs is also not unknown), I have tended to downplay “intersectionality”, which can all too easily degenerate into competitive victimhood, with those who claim  to have been sexually abused at the very top of the hierarchy, even when they lie about it – which they do because the rewards are so great, especially for showbiz people who need a “better” backstory.

Nevertheless, studying how the intersections of race, religion, gender, etc., affect politics and history remains an important analytic tool for interpreting our world. Our understanding of the potential for youth liberation or oppression is diminished if we ignore it.  I was reminded of this when I read (thanks to a link given in the Comments here) Brian Ribbon’s powerful cry of outrage in his article for Mu on the horrific situation in Gaza, especially the suffering of children there, including those far too young to be combatants.

Brian rightly directs much of his ire against American hypocrisy. It is a country that wages war on paedophiles in the name of protecting children, he says, but disregards children’s wellbeing “in the countries whose merciless destruction it actively funds and foments”, including Palestine. This, he believes, is “essentially the result of a racist and imperialist mindset, deeply entrenched in the belief that brown lives are worth less and are more expendable”.

I could not agree more with his attack on the policies of the extremist Israeli government, which in the opinion of humanitarian agencies and leading human rights lawyers have already involved numerous war crimes and could even be classed as genocidal. Even former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, in a BBC interview this week, called Netanyahu’s government a bunch of thugs. Those who blame everything on the admittedly horrific and also criminal 7 October 2023 raid led by Hamas, with its hostage-taking and atrocities against civilians, need to be aware that the situation did not start on that date. For those who feel the need for a quick briefing on the deeper background, I recommend A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Ilan Pappé, who believes the Palestinian cause is just, despite being Jewish himself. He was a senior lecturer in history at the University of Haifa, Israel, for over 20 years. As such, he can hardly be dismissed as a biased Hamas militant, or an Islamist.

That said, to reduce a very complex situation simplistically to any single dimension, in this case to the racial one, of  “brownness” and “whiteness”, is to distort reality in favour of propaganda. As an analytical tool, intersectionality is meaningfully and usefully deployed when all the relevant intersections are considered, from culture to commerce and gender to geography, taking us through and beyond the more commonly theorised dimensions (gender, race, social class) of privilege and victimhood.

Brian’s article hints at this necessary complexity when he turns to America’s propensity for violence, including the mass murder even of white children. Nineteen young kids, most of them aged 10, and two teachers, were massacred almost exactly three years ago, in May 2022, at Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, Texas, gunned down by  a teenage former student at the school. The most politically significant aspect of this catastrophe is not the hateful behaviour of the lone killer himself. As with the Sandy Hook school massacre that I blogged about years ago, and many others, the key point is the national lack of will to make sure such violence never happens again. All that “kick ass America”, as I called it, ever does is shrug its shoulders and parrot platitudes such as “Guns don’t kill people, people do”. As Brian pointed out, guns are still said to be necessary to prevent tyranny, yet the very political forces claiming to defend this ideal have facilitated the birth of Trump’s tyrannical regime.

We might add that it is gun-toting “kick ass” cultures that give disaffected young men and teenage boys not only the firepower to go on the rampage but also, crucially, the attitude: resort to violence by individuals is legitimated and even glamorised in cultures where everyone plays hardball and Might Is Right.

Which brings me back home to Britain and to our fictional – but all too plausible – young murderer in Adolescence. Jamie used a knife not a gun, and his anger was directed  against just one victim, not many. But his mindset was arguably not so different to that of a mass killer. As an incel, his resentment was against all women for their imagined lack of any possible interest in him.

Not that  there was anything inevitable about this. Beliefs are formed and reinforced in social contexts, which vary with time and place. Just as violence comes more easily in a hardball culture, so does resentment against even supposedly liberal values when they go sour, degenerating,  as they regrettably have done on both sides of the Atlantic, from the progressive and noble task of enhancing the wellbeing and prospects of oppressed minorities – through “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) – towards new forms of tyranny in which the formerly oppressed classes themselves become the oppressors, the classic case being feminism.

I have always regarded myself, and remain to this day, an equal-opportunities feminist. Women around the world have earned great and well justified successes in their struggle against male dominance and patriarchal oppression. But their triumph has been so spectacularly successful it is now (in the US and UK at least) the males who are downtrodden. This extends, of course, to the oppression of MAPs, but it does not stop with us. It’s a ball-crusher for normies, too. The rules of consent have become so extensive, elaborate, and bureaucratised that many guys simply give up on romance and love, resorting instead to  the shallower but far less perilous satisfactions of porn.

This is the context that gives credibility to Jamie’s despairing conclusion that he will always be a loser in love: he is bound to be a loser not just because he thinks he is ugly but because the male winners in modern society are few and getting fewer, as today’s picky women keep swiping left. Ironically, feminists have long accused men of treating them as objects, not people, but now it is the guys who fall victim to casual “objectification” by women.

We see a version of this in the third episode of Adolescence, when Jamie is interviewed by a female forensic psychologist, “Briony Ariston”,  who is tasked with producing a pre-trial report on his mental capacity. Her professional standards require her to be objective, and in order to maintain that objectivity, she must not let her own personal feelings and opinions intrude on the interview, as this could influence and distort the interviewee’s response to questions. So, she must be as calm and poker-faced as possible. Officially, this objectivity is a million miles from “objectifying” anyone in a demeaning way. When you objectify someone, you are not really interested in them as a person. But from a professional standpoint, at least, Briony could hardly be more intensely interested in Jamie’s personality.

Jamie, however, takes a dim view of her detached attitude. It makes all her questions seem manipulative; and when, after telling her he believes he is ugly, it becomes inevitably offensive when she coldly refuses to contradict him. What really triggers him, though, sending him into a rage that derails and terminates the interview completely, is her response when he asks, “Do you like me? As a person, I mean. I don’t mean do you fancy me.” There is an awkward silence. Then a deadpan non-answer: “I am here in a professional capacity…”

Erin Doherty, as Briony, is fabulous in capturing the psychologist’s struggle to maintain her poise in the face of Jamie’s moodiness, swinging unpredictably as it does from childlike neediness to hot-tempered confrontation . After he is escorted away, we see her left alone in the empty interview room, forced to “take a moment”, the strain of her encounter etched on her face and audible in her breathing. She looks as though she could do with a stiff drink.

But that is not the face Jamie saw. To him she had been just another cold, indifferent, rejecting bitch.

KIDS INVITED TO PLAY NICELY

Four years ago, Everyone’s Invited, a charity that proclaims itself dedicated to “exposing and eradicating rape culture with empathy, compassion and understanding”, published a report on thousands of testimonies by mainly teenage girls disclosing sexual harassment they said they had suffered from school classmates. The alleged perpetrators had included boys at Britain’s poshest fee-paying schools. As might be expected, Heretic TOC duly commented, in “Everyone’s invited to reconsider childhood”.

A couple of months ago, the charity published a follow-up report, this time on primary schools, naming 1,664 schools in the UK where pupils had submitted anonymous testimonies of “rape culture”, detailing their experiences of “sexist name-calling, harassment, groping, inappropriate touching and penetration”. Innocent little kids, eh? Who’d have thought it! According to a report in The Times, “Their collective howl of pain is harrowing but this is the state of our children in 2025”.

If you want to know what I think, just read my earlier piece, linked above, because I do address the question of children’s introduction to sexual morals and manners from their early years onwards, and I believe what I said then still holds good now. My recommendation for a very early start to relationships education is echoed by the new report, and I find myself in agreement with at least some aspects of what Soma Sara, founder and CEO of Everyone’s Invited, has said, which includes a constructive comment on Adolescence. As her interviewer for a piece in The Times, put it:

The Netflix series Adolescence, which follows a young boy arrested for killing his female classmate, has been very helpful, she [Soma Sara] believes, in showing how every child is vulnerable, including those with loving parents. “This is a collective burden. There is one scene where the kid who has committed the atrocity is screaming to the therapist, ‘But do you like me’. I thought, that is it. Young men want to be seen and appreciated, not viewed as the problem the whole time. Girls had centuries of not being encouraged but now boys feel the same. We need to help them all.”

Where I part company from Sara and others who see “rape culture” everywhere is their tendency to see sexual expression itself as negative, especially among the young. The real problem, to the extent that there is one, is not sex per se but the lack of opportunity kids have for actually having sex from an early age. They need the chance to actually be doing it, before frustration starts making it harder to start with relaxed good manners – manners that can and should be taught from nursery school/kindergarten onwards.

BEEB BACKS BAD-BOY ARTIST ERIC GILL

A rare bit of good news from last month: the vandalised work of a famous MAP sculptor has been restored and gone back on display at one of London’s most prominent and prestigious locations, despite a campaign to have the piece removed and its creator “cancelled”.

There is little I need add. The Guardian’s report, the start of which is reproduced below, gives all the key details. So, enjoy!

The following is the start of the news report in The Guardian by media editor Michael Savage. The full article also includes a photo of the wider facade of Broadcasting House, giving a good idea of the statue’s prominent position:

A controversial sculpture outside the BBC’s London headquarters has been put back on display behind a protective screen after being restored, with the corporation saying it in no way condoned the “abusive behaviour” of its creator.

The work by Eric Gill, which depicts Prospero and Ariel from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, had been largely out of view since it was vandalised with a hammer in 2022. There have long been calls for Gill’s works to be removed since his diaries revealed he had sexually abused his two eldest daughters.

The BBC said it had taken advice before restoring the sculpture that adorns Broadcasting House, while visitors can now scan a QR code near the building to understand the dark background of the sculpture’s creator.

Gill’s statue was carved on-site for Broadcasting House in 1931 and 1932, underlining his status as one of the most prominent sculptors of the early 20th century. However, private diaries published several decades after his death in 1940 revealed his history of sexual abuse.

As well as the abuse of his daughters, they also documented sexual activity with the family dog. His statues, particularly his Broadcasting House work, have become a focus of attention for the hard right, including Tommy Robinson and the conspiracy group QAnon.

Broadcasting House is a Grade II* listed building, meaning it is of special interest. The cost of restoration and protective work was just over £500,000. “Broadcasting House is a building of historical and cultural significance and has been so for almost a century,” a BBC spokesperson said. “The sculpture of Ariel and Prospero – depicted as symbols of broadcasting – is an integral part of it.”