I wrote Adolescence. I won’t give my son a smartphone until he’s 14
Jack Thorne’s story of a boy radicalised by online misogyny has been a Netflix smash hit. He says we should treat digital devices like cigarettes.
Jack Thorne is accustomed to his work starting conversations.
The prolific 46-year-old screenwriter behind the This Is England trilogy, the Covid drama Help and the sexual abuse miniseries National Treasure has never shied away from tackling tricky topics.
However, his most recent hit, the harrowing Netflix drama Adolescence, has not simply charged to No.1 in the streaming charts but also ignited an urgent discussion about teenagers, smartphones and the powerful influence of the toxic manosphere, which every parent, teen and politician has spent the past week debating.
Thorne is married to the comedy agent Rachel Mason, with whom he has a son, Elliott, eight. He will not, his father hopes, own a smartphone until he turns 14.
“I don’t think I’m brave enough to say, when 70 to 80 per cent of his class have got smartphones, no, you need to be isolated. I don’t want him to be isolated like that,” Thorne says, rubbing his head thoughtfully with his palms. “But it will never be in his bedroom until he’s old enough to cope with what it is to have that instrument in private.”
Starring Stephen Graham and Erin Doherty, Adolescence depicts the eminently ordinary Miller family, whose 13-year-old son Jamie - radicalised by online misogyny and filled with a violent rage - kills a female classmate with a kitchen knife.
As research Thorne spent many hours in the “dark corners” of the online manosphere “and as soon as we opened that box it made sense of everything. I realised how attractive the philosophy it promotes is. It did shock and unsettle me, and it did worry me about my nephews and my kid. It made me want to put him in a box and keep him there for the next 10 years.”
With a knack for not merely capturing the Zeitgeist but nailing it to a table for thorough dissection, Thorne’s drama launched a week before the former England football manager Gareth Southgate, delivering the BBC’s annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture, spoke of “callous manipulative and toxic influencers” who “are as far away as you could possibly get from the role models young men need in their lives”.
“That idea of solving this problem by creating better role models for men, that will take 20 years,” Thorne argues, “whereas there are certain things that we can do overnight that could help. I would ban smartphone sales up to the age of 16. Why do kids need smartphones? They can have phones, but not smartphones. It would work like cigarettes. And slowly they do what Rishi Sunak did to cigarettes, which is to say: eventually no one’s going to have them. But certainly keeping kids away from smartphones in whatever way possible, I think, is vital.”
Sir Keir Starmer revealed during prime minister’s questions on Wednesday that his household, like millions of others, had been glued to the show.
“At home we are watching Adolescence with our children,” he said. “I’ve got a 16-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl and it’s a really good drama to watch.”
He called the violence carried out by young men influenced by online influencers “abhorrent” and pledged: “We have to tackle it.”
But the government is failing to stand up adequately to big tech, Thorne says. “I don’t understand why they are hesitant on the question of online safety. I think they’re not quite realising the crisis.”
For Thorne does not accept the argument, made by some commentators, that teenagers have long been the locus of moral panic and that this is little different. “This one has harm at the centre,” he says. “Yes, there was a moral panic about Elvis, but that’s because kids were trying to be free and parents had to adjust to that freedom. This is not about freedom. This isn’t about drugs. This isn’t even about harming yourself - this is about harming others. And being told that the other gender is an enemy is a totally new thought system.”
Adolescence did not start life as a story of masculinity and misogyny. “It started with Stephen talking about knife crime,” Thorne says. Graham, his frequent collaborator, had noticed – and been disturbed by – the growing number of knife attacks by young men on young women.
A female colleague suggested that he look at incel culture. “And I had always dismissed incel culture – I thought they were people that shout loudly but don’t really have an impact. And then I started really looking into it,” Thorne says. “I said, ‘OK, I’m a 13-year-old boy and I hear [a false statistic quoted by incels] that 80 per cent of women are attracted to 20 per cent of men [known as ‘the 80/20 rule’]. I hear this culture is female-dominated and this culture is perverted by female minds. And that your job [as a man] is to get fit, get strong and harm and manipulate because that is the only way you are going to be successful.
“And I think, as a lonely, isolated [boy], someone that believes themselves unattractive, hearing that stuff, I sit up and I go: I want to be successful. I want to be meaningful. I don’t think this world is fair because it doesn’t feel fair to me, because people don’t like me in the way I want to be liked. And so what do I do? Do I listen to this person and do I hear this stuff? Yeah I do, because it makes sense to me. It’s a really powerful idea because the logic of it is so attractive.”
From the outset Thorne and Graham, who co-wrote the series as well as starring in it, were determined to avoid oversimplifying the issue.
“Stephen had one big rule, which was: I don’t want this to blame the parents,” Thorne says. “The idea of male rage – boy rage – is really complicated, so we wanted to create a ‘triangle of blame’ with Jamie in the centre of it.”
That triangle, he says, is “the culture that’s surrounding him, it’s education and it’s family. We wanted to talk about all these things and create a complicated portrait. A friend could have stopped it. A teacher could have stopped it. A parent could have stopped it. So all of those people have some degree of responsibility for it”.
And while its focus is the teens who consume a diet of violent messaging and imagery, Adolescence also provokes what Thorne says are “deliberately” difficult questions about parenting and, specifically, fatherhood. As Jamie faces sentencing, his father, Eddie (Graham), tearfully oscillates between blaming himself ("I should have done better") and absolving himself ("It’s not our fault, we can’t blame ourselves”, “He was in his room, we thought he was safe, we thought we were doing the right thing").
“They didn’t see what was happening to that kid,” Thorne says. “They weren’t having discussions about how to help the kid because they didn’t know that he was in trouble. They didn’t even know a conversation needed to happen.”
Fears about his own fathering were stitched into the show too. “In the first episode, when Eddie says to the lawyer, ‘I don’t know how to do this. I know he needs help and I’m not sure I’m the right person to give that help,’ there’s a lot of me in that. It’s a question I think a lot of us worry about a lot of the time.”
One of four children, Thorne grew up in Bristol, then Berkshire, the son of Mike, a town planner, and Maggie, a teacher who later became a carer for adults with learning difficulties. Mike was also a union organiser and a volunteer for the Citizens Advice Bureau and Thorne’s childhood was one of marches, protests and union conferences. It was also a childhood spent on the peripheries.
“That’s where my autism diagnosis has helped me a lot [Thorne was diagnosed in 2022 after a listener to his appearance on Desert Island Discs asked if he’d considered whether he might be on the spectrum] because I was the kid instinctively on the outside who tried to make friends but didn’t really understand how to get involved in that conversation,” he says. “There were a lot of those experiences of just not quite having the dynamics right. I wasn’t particularly bullied. I was sort of the least popular member of a group of boys.”
In an era of smartphones he’d easily have been sucked in, he says. “I don’t think I would have been Jamie, by any means, but I think it would have made sense to me. I think I would have probably found a group of friends to talk to online when I was in my room on my own. And that would not have been good for me.”
Writing the series – and in particular episode three, in which Jamie, played by the 15-year-old Owen Cooper in his screen debut), hurls misogynistic vitriol at his psychologist, played by Doherty, revealing for the first time the extent of his radicalisation – Thorne tapped into that adolescent self. It was, he says, “deeply uncomfortable”. “This was me going to a place that I was entirely terrified by. I thought a lot about the way that my teenage self understood attraction and understood how my sexuality worked. This had too much of that for me to feel comfortable.”
In his 2021 McTaggart Lecture Thorne spoke of television as an “empathy box”. With Adolescence, he says, he’s not asking for empathy for men who do terrible things.
“I think we’re asking for understanding and I think that’s a distinction. If we don’t try and understand Jamie and try to understand that position, then we’re not going to solve the problem.”
But he does not believe creating a “minister for men”, mooted by some politicians and the Higher Policy Education Institute will help.
“No, I think a minister for technology that actually wants to solve the online problem is the answer,” he says. “And actually this also falls under a minister for women because it’s about harm to women. This show is about harm to women.”
The Times
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