The kid seems so innocent. The grown-ups can’t understand why he did it. A 13-year-old boy – the protagonist of Adolescence, the Netflix drama written by Jack Thorne – stabbed and murdered a female schoolmate in a fit of sexist rage, having been radicalised by social media. The series has been wildly successful, reigniting a public conversation about young men and online misogyny. But the drama itself, and the murder it depicts, isn’t what’s most shocking about this story.
What’s shocking is that anyone is shocked. After all, there is nothing remotely fanciful about its plot. Boys and men have been committing acts of misogynist terrorism long before they began to be hypnotised by online cults.
Nonetheless, several young men have recently been in the news for exactly this sort of murder, including Kyle Clifford, who was jailed for killing three women with a crossbow, motivated, according to the judge, by “self-pity”. At trial, a jury heard that Clifford had watched ten videos from the violently misogynist influencer Andrew Tate in the 24 hours before he raped and murdered his ex-girlfriend, and killed her mother and sister. The boy at the centre of Adolescence has, we are told, been drip-fed the same poison – and Thorne has spoken movingly about how he found his character’s mindset all too plausible.
What is implausible is the surprise public figures are now performing over the influence of men like Tate. “This violence carried out by young men, influenced by what they see online, is a real problem. It’s abhorrent, and we have to tackle it,” Keir Starmer said at Prime Minister’s Questions on 19 March – expecting us to believe it took a popular TV programme to alert the political class of this country to the long-running epidemic of violence against women and girls. Having declared Adolescence a “very good watch” for households with teenagers, Starmer is now supporting an ongoing campaign to have the programme shown in parliament and schools. Thorne and starring actor Stephen Graham have been invited to parliament to discuss online safety with MPs.
But our political representatives knew long before now about the growing threats of our misogynistic culture. They were told – by women, by girls, by anyone who was paying attention online. What today’s outrage seems to prove is that they either weren’t listening, or they didn’t believe us, or they simply didn’t care – until it was way, way too late for “we told you so”.
Last summer three girls were murdered by a man at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, triggering a wave of riots across the UK. In 2021 a man killed five people, including his mother and a three-year-old girl, inspired by “incel” ideology. Despite years of government promises and strategies, the “epidemic of violence against women and girls” is getting worse, according to a highly critical report from the National Audit Office released in January. The “government’s disjointed approach” has “failed to improve outcomes for victims”, said Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee. And it’s not only impressionable young men and boys who are getting drawn into vengeful, violent misogyny. This is an adult problem, and it has been part of adult politics for a long, long time.
As a young journalist in the early 2010s, I was a target of coordinated online harassment and abuse. I was 24 when I started regularly receiving bomb threats and death threats alongside the daily tide of rape fantasies, and I was not alone. When campaigners tried to raise the alarm, we were told by men online that we were too sensitive; that these were just angry boys, kidding around. Couldn’t we take a joke? Surely we’d done something to provoke them. Hadn’t we asked for it?
When the threat became more serious, we were told to empathise with the perpetrators. I spoke to the men and boys who verbally attacked me and my friends. I asked how and why they became so sickened by sexist rage. I tried to empathise with their despair, with how lost and helpless they felt. But nobody had a plan for how to stop them. The more women and girls suffered, and even died – Sabina Nessa, Sarah Everard – as boys and young men and not-so-young men got mean-drunk on the spirit of the age, the more society simply asked “why?”, as if eventually there would be a comfortable answer.
The third time I went to the police to report online harassment, an editor from this magazine went with me. I wasn’t surprised that we were so swiftly told that nothing could or would be done – but they hadn’t been expecting the shoulder-shrug, and I still remember their outrage. It would be many years before this sort of weaponised misogyny would be treated as a problem. In the meantime, we were told just to suck it up and grow a thick skin. Thick enough, presumably, to stop bullets and knives. If we just ignored them, the angry incels and boorish sex pests would get bored and move on.
But they didn’t move on. Instead, they went pro. The disparate threads of the manosphere became a movement with political ambitions. Andrew Tate, who thinks rape victims must “bear responsibility” for their attacks and who routinely suggests inflicting physical violence on women, is the poster boy for this professional misogyny, but there are others. In February, the Trump administration reportedly lobbied to ensure Tate was allowed out of Romania, where he had been charged with human trafficking and sexual violence, with one alleged victim being 15 years old. There is nothing ironic about those charges. Tate and his imitators are not joking. They never were.
We have never been dealing with random acts of violence. Nor is this aggression solely found in lonely children, groomed by venal influence-grifters into nihilistic fantasies of victimhood and sexual revenge. Focusing on vulnerable children caught up in this cult of misogyny distracts attention from the adult men at its centre, including those now in seats of power.
Yet we are still asked to empathise with men who hurt women, to consider that they might have a point – not about violence being the solution, but about the way young men suffer, how they are left behind, the cruelty of women and girls, the unfairness of it all. You would never take those feelings and go to shoot up a cinema or a yoga studio or a primary school. But can’t you understand why someone else would? Over the years, I’ve spoken to countless men and boys who say: that could have been me. I’d like to hear more about those who avoided becoming radicalised rather than endless stories about those who did.
I now know as much as I care to know about lost boys and how they become addicted to online misogyny; about male resentment and how it is nurtured by political entrepreneurs who whip up woman-hatred. I have watched these young men turn their refusal to deal with their feelings like grown-ups into an entire political movement. I am sick of being held hostage by the emotions of embittered, overgrown, violent boys. What I want to know – what we all need to learn, and quickly – is how they can be stopped.
[See also: The cyclical history of abortion rights]
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This article appears in the 26 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Putin’s Endgame