Adolescence shows the internet is no place for children
It's time to have a frank and open conversation about what's happening to our young boys - without demonising them
The Netflix series ‘Adolescence’ has evoked an extraordinary response, striking a chord with millions of parents, teachers and teenagers who recognise the extraordinary and too often negative influence of the online world on young men. Coming so soon after the launch of the Centre for Social Justice’s “Lost Boys” report, the plight of our nation’s boys and young men is now firmly in the spotlight.
We are now—finally—having an open discussion about how boys are left behind in education and employment, struggling with an epidemic of fatherlessness and disadvantaged by an increasingly feminised culture that has nothing positive to say about masculinity. From Gareth Southgate to Steven Bartlett to Sir Keir Starmer, British movers and shakers are waking up to the issue. But not everyone believes the problem is real.
On the Left there is still a hard core of progressives who believe that there is nothing special about men, and that boys must be ‘educated’ in the harms of ‘toxic masculinity’.
On the Right, although there is more concern about fatherlessness and acknowledgment of the need for a positive vision of masculinity, there are still some sizeable blind spots. Some claim that ‘Adolescence’ and the very idea of ‘lost boys’ is a moral panic that is unfairly demonising working-class boys and is a sinister excuse to introduce online censorship.
They argue that parents just need to take more responsibility for what their children are doing online, and government should stay out the picture?
We should not demonise anyone. But telling the truth about what is happening to our boys is not demonising them. It is a fact that the vast majority, almost nine in ten (87%), of child-on-child sexual offences – which are rising fast—are committed by boys. It is a fact that almost all knife crime is carried out by male teens.
As the National Crime Agency revealed, it is a fact that gangs of British boys are blackmailing children to sexually abuse their siblings online. These appalling truths should not be used to demonise boys, rather to deliver an important wake-up call to society—how badly are we failing to protect young boys if by the tender age of 12 or 13 they have been so deeply corrupted and misled?
Of course, ‘Adolescence’ is a work of fiction, but the idea of ‘lost boys’ is not an overblown moral panic. In polling conducted for the Lost Boys report, we found that almost two thirds of young women say young men are “pretty frightening”. Over 40% of young men agree with them. When a third of young women have been choked during sex (compared to 3% % of older women) and half of boys say that girls “expect” violence during sex, this is not a fringe issue.
Neither is it entirely a parenting issue. Parents should take responsibility for their own children. But 97% of kids own smartphones, and are therefore just a click away from the kind of toxic content that desensitise them to violence, seeds and nurtures grievances and leads them into harm and depravity. Parents can set limits on screen time, and monitor content, but 60% of teens admit to bypassing parental controls. Many even have a ‘secret phone’ that their parents know nothing about.
This is the point of adolescence—parents cannot and should not ‘control’ teenagers, who need increasing independence and responsibility to prepare them for adult life. Yet this only works if society is generally safe, if teens can exercise their growing independence free from the threat of being sexually abused, groomed, and exploited.
Until around 2010, this held true, but when culture moved online, teens no longer explored a safe environment but rather had to navigate a Wild West. There are no friends or neighbours or “safe adults” keeping an eye on your son in the online world, a space where paedophiles, predators and pornographers roam free. Parents now have a choice—cut your child off from the world and home school them with no Wi-Fi; or accept that we have limited if any control over the content to which our children are exposed.
Surely even the most committed libertarians cannot believe that 97% of parents are bad parents.
Parenting is not a private matter; it takes a village to raise a child. Of course, parents must take ultimate responsibility for their own offspring, but no parent can raise their children to have good character and moral virtue if those moral standards are not reinforced by the wider community. And that wider community—insofar as it is now an online one—has no moral standards whatsoever. Even the best parents are constantly competing with a destructive virtual anti-culture that spills over into playgrounds and school corridors. There has been a 400% increase in sex offences recorded in schools in just five years.
Human character and behaviour are not instinctive; rather they are learned from those who influence us. Children are not ‘mini adults’, unaffected by what they see and hear, able to discern good behaviour from bad behaviour and resist being led astray by ‘education’.
Children are vulnerable and highly suggestible. We do not need to censor the internet for adults, just like we don’t need to ban adults drinking alcohol, driving cars, going to nightclubs or having sex with whoever they want. But we are fools if we think that online teen culture is a side issue or a private matter when it is so very tragically destroying our boys. The internet is no place for children.
