Adolescence has gripped parents, but our debates are missing a crucial thread

Netflix’s Adolescence seemingly came out of nowhere this month. The four-part series about a juvenile knife crime was streamed by almost 25 million people in its first four days.

The well-meaning, working-class parents of 13-year-old protagonist Jamie – who is accused of murdering a female classmate – struggle to understand what has happened and where they went wrong, as any parent would. Viewers are forced to ask the same questions, seeing an all too familiar society reflecting back. This could have happened, it feels like, to many of us.

Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller in the four-part drama Adolescence.

Adolescence has already garnered reams of analysis, discussing factors in the series that contribute to youth and gendered violence: rising levels of misogyny and male entitlement, parents too busy to know what their kids are up to, dangerous online influencers, poor male role modelling. These are all a part of the deadly mix, and all need our attention. But there’s another important element that has largely missed the spotlight: economic inequality.

There’s an unspoken desperation to Jamie’s family’s entrenched financial situation. His dad works long, unfriendly hours to make ends meet, yet can’t afford to have his van repaired. Jamie refers to his psychologist as “posh”, implying someone alien to himself.

Globally, economic inequality has worsened significantly over decades. And while absolute poverty doesn’t lead to violence in and of itself, research shows that “relative deprivation” – the experience of being worse off than others – does. When there is a massive gulf between rich and poor, those stuck at the bottom can develop a sense of hopelessness and frustration which, especially in young men, is correlated to risk-taking and violent behaviour. Add misogynistic influencers to the mix, and you have ticked off some of the main risk factors for gendered violence.

The “manosphere” is mentioned in Adolescence when we hear Jamie was influenced by the “red pill” philosophy: that 80 per cent of women are attracted to the “top” 20 per cent of men, leaving the remainder – like him – doomed to be incels (involuntarily celibate). These ideas proliferate online and in the real world, and it’s implied these fears were what stoked Jamie’s anger.

As questionable as the red pill philosophy sounds, some evolutionary biologists believe it does contain a skerrick of cherry-picked truth. In any society where most of the wealth and power is in the hands of a few elite men, polygyny (where men have more than one wife) arises, where the wealthiest men attract the majority of women. A kind of metaphoric polygyny also occurs in countries where the practice is illegal, too: at last count, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has 14 children with four different women.

While there are many factors that contribute to gendered violence, and there are plenty of wealthy perpetrators, those most likely to commit violent crimes are young, poor, marginalised men – the very demographic Jamie sits within. Though that violence is sometimes directed towards other males, women and girls become obvious targets for this disenfranchised rage, as we saw in Adolescence, when influencers encourage boys to believe that they’re being rejected because of feminism and told to “man up” and take control.

The irony is that this explosive dynamic is driven by patriarchy and economic inequality, not feminism. Yet, it’s often male elites with surplus money, power and mistresses, who are stoking misogyny among these boys and men, shifting blame away from themselves.

The more the wealth gap widens, the more poor, marginalised men are likely to turn to extreme risk-taking and violent behaviour and, ironically, less likely to support gender equality: two predisposing factors for gendered violence. They are also more likely to vote for leaders they perceive to hold entrenched “traditional male” values, such as Donald Trump and Peter Dutton, and are the most likely to follow misogynistic influencers like Andrew Tate and join online incel communities. Quickly, they become caught in a dangerous feedback loop.

With two in five Australian women experiencing gendered violence since the age of 15, and one woman killed every nine days by a current or former partner, it’s little wonder Adolescence has been watched by so many parents across the country. It is a hot-button issue. And while there are many factors contributing to gendered violence, all reasons need to be addressed. We can’t afford to underestimate the incendiary effects of extreme economic inequality.

Sonia Orchard is author of Groomed, a memoir about abuse and the Australian justice system, published by Affirm Press.

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