Adolescence: A terrifying insight into a disturbing world I knew nothing about - Christa Ackroyd

Graham is surely one of our most talented actors.

But even he could not have conceived made and acted in a drama about a young boy played brilliantly by first time actor Owen Cooper while knowing that two years down the line when it aired it would coincide with an equally disturbing report entitled Lost Boys or the equally brilliant lecture by Yorkshire’s adopted son Gareth Southgate on male role models. Or could he? Maybe that is his genius.

I am often accused with some justification of constantly banging the drum for female equality and why not?

I grew up in an era where women were far from equal both economically and opportunity wise.

For heavens sake when I was born women couldn’t take out a loan without their husband’s permission or have a mortgage.

It was presumed we were not financially and emotionally astute enough without a male provider and protector.

How often have I celebrated how far we have come in this column ? But, and this is what I found so shocking about Adolescence, have we done so at the expense of our young boys and menfolk ? I don’t think so.

What is more I am not prepared for society to regress into darker times by putting women back in their boxes and changing the dialogue about equality in order to protect male pride.

I have always been adamant that equality means taking the men with us so together we walk the same path, which is why I have often said women only this and women only that are pretty pointless gatherings.

But are they dangerous ? Just one of the questions I had never considered that Adolescence raises.

Every time the Andrew Tates of this world spout their toxic masculinity which I believe threatens to undermine the value of young girls and young women I never once considered that the truth is it threatens more the minds of the young boys who believe it.

After watching Adolescence I now do. It is rare a drama educates as well as enthrals. But this one, albeit a tough watch, does both.

For those who have not seen it, it follows the arrest of a young boy for stabbing to death a girl at his school. I will say no more than that if you haven’t watched it.

But the more I think about it this is not a question of undermining men and young boys it is the simple age old problem of bullying. But bullying in the world we now find ourselves in.

When you and I were young we saw the bullies, we may have even been their target. There is one huge difference. When we were young we could escape them.

When we closed our front doors we were safe. They couldn’t follow us inside and they certainly couldn’t continue their evil little games in the sanctity of our own space, usually our bedrooms. Now they can and they do.

And before we start saying take their phones off them, that genie was out of the bottle a long time ago. And even if we do, even if we add the parental blocks as we should, the bullies will find a way through.

A young boy or girl opening his or her computer to do their homework is just as vulnerable. And I am not talking about accessing adult content here. Chat groups even among so called friends can be just as dangerous.

As a columnist I am supposed to give you the answers. Having watched Adolescence I am pretty sure I am ill equipped to do so. I knew nothing of the jibe of ‘ incel’. I had to look it up.

It means involuntary celebacy or in this case the claim that a young boy was so unlikeable and unattractive that he would be a virgin forever.

Though why 13 year old boys and girls would even be thinking of that was profoundly worrying. The fact is they do. The lecture by the son to his detective father on the true meaning of emojis blew my mind.

And I had to look up ‘the red pill’ vaguely remembering it as a scene from The Matrix, when in fact is is a phrase, an online discussion group and a network of websites preoccupied with both the men’s rights movement and how to pick up and treat women. And I am terrified.

One thing we do know is that something is going wrong with our boys.

Perhaps it is Covid when they got too used to staying unsupervised in their bedrooms, when we gave them permission to spend more time than is good for them chatting online to their friends because they could no longer meet them in the park or at school. I don’t know.

The sad truth is whatever is to blame the number of young disenfranchised young men who are out of work or not in education after leaving school is around 40 per cent. For young girls that figure is less than ten.

But then we can’t say we haven’t been warned.

Going through some old cuttings my mum had kept of my columns in another newspaper I came across one written more than 20 years ago featuring my very good and extremely intelligent friend Carol Vorderman.

It was around the time she was being slated when at 40 years old she attended some big awards ceremony in that blue Ungaro dress, if you remember.

I wrote at the time we should stop concentrating on how she looked and listen to her warnings about the largely unprotected emerging internet. It was, she said, a breeding ground for pornography, grooming and hate.

And how right she was as she took her campaign to the politicians to insist the burgeoning online industry was better policed. Well it isn’t and now we are paying the price.

The result is an increase in teenage suicide, murders among so called friendship groups upon which Adolescence is based and a generation which are put under enormous pressure to look and act the way the anonymous influencers say they should.

Parents, grandparents, teachers, politicians and all responsible adults have a duty to get involved and find out what is going on in the lives and minds of our young people. And if Adolescence taught us anything it is that we are at best naive and at worst too lazy to do anything about it.

I started this column by saying it is not often a TV drama makes you think and educates you about a world you never knew existed.

This one has done just that and started a conversation I didn’t even know we should be having because I had no idea what was going on.

To start that conversation we must be clear. It is not about women and girls getting too big for their boots in their demands to be treated fairly and respectfully.

It is how to stop the dark corners of the online world poisoning the minds of all our young people right in front of our noses but without our knowledge.