Adolescence nailed my biggest fear about UK schools
We're living in bleak times.
The Netflix show Adolescence perfectly encapsulates my biggest fear about UK schools.
That is, that the shocking standard of sex education is doing nothing to oppose incel culture, violent porn and Andrew Tate.
Adolescence, which has been dubbed the best TV show in years, follows a good-hearted working class family The Millers as their life is upended when 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested for killing a teenage girl.
What follows is an unflinching and harrowing exploration of the dangers facing young people in the darkest corners of the internet.
One key take-away is how there are a severe lack of protections in place to stop young boys being sucked into the manosphere.
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And I know from my Master’s thesis looking at sex education that these lessons should be part of the first line of defense – but schools are letting us all down.
It follows the family of Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old who kills a teenage girl (Picture: Courtesy of Netflix)In 2021, an Ofsted survey of 800 children aged 13 and above found eight out of 10 school girls say sexual assault of any kind happens ‘a lot’ or ‘sometimes’ between peers.
Nine out of 10 girls had experienced sexist name calling by a peer, and 92% had been sent unsolicited explicit pictures and videos.
In short: almost all school girls had experienced some form of abuse by a fellow pupil. That is bleak.
Given these statistics, it’s no wonder the Ofsted review found many children felt Relationship, Sex, and Health Education (RSE) was ‘too little, too late’ in equipping them for their lives, and they admitted to turning to social media to get their information.
Enter Andrew Tate… And Adolescence.
For those uninitiated, Tate is an extreme misogynist self-help guru who grabs at money and fame like a petulant toddler under the guise of helping young men find their, ahem, masculinity. He is referenced in Adolescence as being a driving force behind incel culture.
The bald toddler has said far too many nefarious sentences to list. Tate’s declaration that women should ‘bear responsibility’ for rape would almost be satirically funny if other people didn’t actually believe this. His normalisation of violence against women (who are the property of men, FYI) would be disregarded as the blabberings of a single madman, if 1 in 4 women hadn’t experienced domestic abuse in the UK.
This moron is infecting the minds of young boys all over the UK, as explored by Adolescence. Young Jamie exhibits an inherent disrespect for women – most evidently when he is faced with a female psychologist, who he attempts to intimidate and control having spent many of his evenings cooped up in his room online.
UK schools are failing teenagers PIcture: Courtesy of Netflix)But the problem is, Tate is not hiding in any dark corners. He’s right out in the open talking about his godforsaken ‘manosphere’ and posing for pictures with Nigel Farage – now an elected MP. Just like how in Adolescence, pictures of teenage girls are circulated around the school without their permission, it’s all misogyny in plain sight.
Tate is easily findable on a number of social media platforms and the algorithms even seem to push his women-hating ‘content’ towards lost, emotionally repressed young men.
He has been welcomed with open arms into the USA after fleeing to Romania from the UK following sexual allegations (don’t look so shocked!), which he has – more surprisingly – denied. (There was me thinking such allegations would be kind of his whole shtick.)
Despite all of this, the state of sex education right now means we’re not doing anything to stop him. We’re instead giving him a free pass into the minds of our boys, who will grow up to be a whole generation of men.
If the government wants to stick by its statement that violence against women and girls is a national emergency, then RSE is the first thing we should fix.
The UK’s approach to sex education has always been cautious, conservative and a reaction to a moral panic. It’s also never been, and still is not fully, compulsory.
The history of sex education in the UKRSHE was introduced in the 1940s in tizz after World War II saw the rates of non marital births almost double. For decades teachers (non specific to RSE) were advised to draw on their own religious and moral beliefs – and observe farm yard animals – to teach youngsters to ‘control sexual impulses’ in ‘preparation for family life’.
In the 1980s, sex education was under the spotlight again. This time to prevent the spread of HIV and teenage pregnancy, which were rippling across the country.
The 2000s guidelines were tweaked, but it was very much of the Mean Girls era: ‘Don’t have sex in the missionary position. Don’t have sex standing up. Just don’t do it.’
A slideshow that was used in 2019 – provided to me by a teacher – warned girls against one night stands. It said women often feel ‘cheap’ ‘easy’ and ‘degraded’ after them.
It also said women are ‘more likely to fall in love’ than men after having sex.
Like in 1943, the 2020 RSE guidelines were born from their own moral panic: the dangers of the online world. The word ‘online’ is mentioned 66 times throughout the 50-page document, which pales the 12 mentions of ‘consent’ in comparison.
The RSE guidelines of 2020 are more focused on protecting young people from their inevitable exposure to porn than they are on discussing the underlying culture of misogyny.
While the 2020 guidelines were heralded by the Government as the first compulsory RSE curriculum in history, they are not compulsory in reality. Relationships education has no opt-out, but parents can withdraw their children from any or all of sex education at both primary and secondary school.
While the new guidelines were unsatisfactory, they were a step in the right direction.
But then, three years later in 2023, there was a big old panic and we went back to pretending to live in a time where children don’t see violent porn, sexually abuse other children, and watch Andrew Tate spouting hate online.
A new updated guidelines, yet to be rolled out, is currently in the draft stage.
In these new proposed guidelines, age restrictions will be brought in to ‘ensure children aren’t being taught about sensitive and complex subjects before they are ready to fully understand them’.
It was advised that in secondary school, issues regarding sexual harassment ‘shouldn’t be taught before year 7’ – that’s 11 to 12 years old – and ‘any explicit discussion of sexual activity before year 9’ (ages 13 to 14) was not welcome.
It’s time for the government to step up to the task of protecting our children (PIcture: Courtesy of Netflix)Nine in 10 children own a mobile phone – and therefore have access to violent porn, despite efforts to stop this – by the time they reach the age of 11.
I remember boys watching porn in my school in year 6 – and that was in the days of tiny screens, new tech Bluetooth, and Blackberrys. God knows what a 13-year-old boy, just like Jamie Miller in Adolescence, has seen by the time RSE catches up with them aged 13.
If Jamie had received decent sex education by a specifically-trained professional before 13, maybe he would have found a better way to be a man – and impress his loving, but stereotypically masculine, father – than fall for disturbing online narratives.
Maybe if he’d been taught about misogyny in school, he wouldn’t be a misogynist. Maybe if he’d been taught that the 80:20 rule – where 80% of women fancy just 20% of men – is absolute rubbish, he wouldn’t have felt so lost. Maybe if those teaching RSE were actually versed in the subject – not English or Maths teachers with a free period – we would have a hope.
As Stephen Graham said of his character in Adolescence – the father of Jamie – to Tudum: ‘You need to understand how he allowed his son to become absent, what Eddie taught his son, and what he didn’t teach his son.’
Parents can only do so much. Now it’s time for the government to step in and treat violence against women and girls like the emergency it is. Or boys will continue to be radicalised and girls will keep on dying, just like in Adolescence.
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