”Adolescence” delivers no easy answers

Police break down a door with a battering ram and rush into a townhouse in Liverpool, weapons drawn. A terrified family is forced to the ground before officers move upstairs to one of the bedrooms. There, they find the person they came for: a scrawny thirteen-year-old boy, so scared he has wet himself. He is arrested right there in his room, surrounded by toys and posters of cartoon characters, suspected of brutally murdering a girl his own age.

Adolescence is an unflinching dive into what may be every parent’s worst fear: that their own child could have committed something both irreparable and unforgivable. That a person they brought into the world and raised is capable of harm—and that maybe, just maybe, they could have prevented it if they had been more present and attentive as parents. But what the show truly excels at is avoiding oversimplified solutions or explanations. 

The series examines the manosphere, toxic masculinity, and incel culture. The boy’s school is portrayed as violent and deeply hierarchical. The suspected killer and his friends are low-status kids who are bullied. And yet—his home is functional and loving, his family nonviolent and seemingly stable. No major traumas. No obvious generational patterns of violence.

As the parents reflect, they remember giving their son a computer for his room. A computer, a keyboard, a headset, and a closed door. What was he really watching in there, alone? We never find out. There are no easy answers here—none of the comforting solutions we, as TV audiences, are so often spoon-fed to give us hope as the credits roll.

How do you raise a boy so that he doesn’t become violent and misogynistic? Could his parents have done more? The only thing we know for sure is that there are many reasons why someone chooses violence. It can’t be blamed solely on the parents, the school, social media, Andrew Tate, or the perpetrator himself. All of these factors exist within a system far more complex than even the most well-written TV show could capture. There are no simple solutions—because none exist.

At the organization MÄN, we know that violence can be prevented. Boys can grow up without becoming violent or developing hatred toward women—but the path to achieving that isn’t easy. It’s not enough for schools and families to do their part. It takes a collective effort from all of society. To truly address the issue of men’s violence against women, we need to shift the focus away from harsher punishments, demonization, and narratives about “a lone madman” and instead ask: How did he get there? How did he become violent? If we only focus on legal consequences and explanations after the fact, we are already too late. The act of violence has already been committed.