Mother Jones illustration; Netflix
In March, the fictional TV miniseries Adolescence became a surprise global sensation. Its story centers on the Millers, a working-class family of four in England whose world is upended when 13-year-old Jamie Miller—a bright, soft-spoken schoolboy—is arrested for murder. Jamie is accused of fatally stabbing a female classmate, Katie, apparently after being radicalized online. Through June, according to Netflix, the show had been viewed at least 144 million times, and it was nominated for 13 Emmy awards.
Hailed widely as a dramatic and technical masterpiece—each of the four episodes was shot with a single continuous take—the show is a rare form of artistic lightning in a bottle: a tragic tale that is riveting to watch and has managed to ignite major awareness about a societal problem. Its crisp realism and inescapable pathos are so effective that Prime Minister Keir Starmer mistakenly referred to the series as a “documentary” when endorsing it to be shown in Britain’s schools. It literally set off a worldwide conversation about social media, youth, and parenting.
Amid all this triumph, however, Adolescence carries a certain tragedy of its own. It neglects a vital aspect of the violence it explores—one that is crucial to prevention.
At the heart of the story are the potential poison effects of social media on vulnerable kids. [Editor’s note: spoilers are ahead.] Jamie, portrayed to astonishing effect by young actor Owen Cooper, is under the sway of misogynist influencers and “incel” grievances, including the phony claim that 80 percent of all women are attracted only to 20 percent of all men—the “80-20 thing,” as young Jamie casually puts it during a psychological evaluation.
Did such content motivate his shocking act of violence?
That’s among the questions haunting Luke Bascombe, the solemn detective in charge of the case (played by Ashley Walters, another of the several superb performances). The story begins with Bascombe leading a tactical team on a jarring morning raid in a tidy residential neighborhood: a battering ram through the Millers’ front door, a terrified and weeping family, a fresh-faced kid improbably hauled off to jail.
The show grabs and never lets go—but before that, a much quieter moment at the very start has already given a clue as to how Adolescence will scramble a familiar crime genre. Just before the raid kicks off, Bascombe stands outside his police vehicle listening to a voicemail from his own teenage son, who claims he’s ill and needs to skip school. Bascombe shakes his head, exhales. (What parent hasn’t been there?) He plays the message for his partner back in the car, confiding with a note of jocularity that his son called him rather than his mom, because he’s the one with “the soft touch.”
We aren’t just with Bascombe the cop, in other words, but also Bascombe the dad. This is an artful signal: There is much to come about the role of parents in the horrific tragedy at hand. For one, Bascombe’s son will later show him what he fails to understand about young teens navigating a harsh digital world.
As Jamie sits through a police interrogation in episode one, the investigators lay out evidence culminating with CCTV footage of him stabbing Katie to death in a parking lot. There is no question he did it. The story’s central concern then comes into view.
“Do you want to give us a reason why?” Bascombe asks, his interrogator’s cool now betraying exasperation. “Why would you do something like this?”
Jamie sobs, but with no answer forthcoming, the story will have to go in search of one—next at his school; then with a female psychologist, who is shaken to her core when evaluating him face to face; and finally, amid the emotional wreckage of Jamie’s family.
The co-creators of Adolescence, Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (who also stars as Jamie’s pained father, Eddie) have said that they set out to make the show after two murders by teens in Britain motivated them to “look in the eye of male rage.” Their focus was on incels, a subculture of aggrieved boys and men who identify as “involuntary celibates” and blame females for a lack of sex, and on the so-called manosphere, which champions male aggression and dominance. These online phenomena aren’t new, but have evolved with mass shootings and the rise of widely known misogynist figures such as Andrew Tate.
Where the story falls short is in how it depicts the nature of Jamie’s attack as both spontaneous and fundamentally incomprehensible. It suggests at several turns that his crime came out of nowhere, without warning. Everyone is shocked and devastated; no one could see it coming. Jamie himself denies the murder in the form of total disassociation: Repeatedly, he tells his father, and then Briony Ariston, the psychologist who evaluates him, that “it wasn’t me” and “I’ve not done anything.” He otherwise seems to be normal, bright, and, well, just a kid.
That is, until an indelible scene in episode three, when Jamie explodes at Ariston with menacing verbal aggression, looming over her and revealing the misogyny that has corrupted his nascent self-identity. Barely able to conceal her shock and revulsion, Ariston leaves the meeting room to collect herself, then watches Jamie briefly through a TV monitor before returning. The camera stays close on her silent gaze as a correctional officer talks at her about how enigmatic violent offenders can be. A passing glimpse on the monitor of Jamie sitting motionless reveals nothing, suggesting Ariston’s own bewilderment.
As the final episode culminates with the agonizing parents wondering what else they could or should have done (monitor his internet use more, for starters), no one gains any deeper understanding of what led up to Jamie’s violence.
This framing resonates with widespread news coverage and public perception of predatory attacks, known also in the field of behavioral threat assessment as “targeted violence.” The recurring version in America, of course, is with school and mass shooters. The reality of motive in many cases is complex and sometimes even mystifying terrain, and a common default is to portray these attacks as inexplicable “evil” perpetrated by inscrutable “monsters.” The recent history of mass shootings in America is strewn with this narrative, from the Las Vegas massacre in 2017 to the latest disaster, at a church in Minneapolis, in which the suicidal 23-year-old’s motive was characterized widely as a “mystery.” (This also intersects with the rush to assign various ideological blame for an attack, often based on thin or contradictory evidence, misinformation, or even no information at all.) But that narrative obscures a behavioral process whose recognition is key to prevention—including warning signs such as threatening communications, expressions of suicidal despair, and tactical preparation, which can indeed be identified and explained.
Thorne and Graham are preoccupied with the dangers of today’s unbridled technology and online content, foregrounding the idea, as they put it, that the proverbial “village” needed to raise kids can also potentially destroy them, if adults are not properly vigilant. The story powerfully evokes this problem without trying to preach solutions. (That is often the domain of great art, of course; the show is so disciplined in this regard that not once does it even gesture at the corporate tech titans, who have never genuinely cared about the safety of kids over profits.) As Thorne put it, the tragedy wrought by their young fictional killer is “about parents that didn’t see him, a school system that let him down, and the ideas that he consumed.”
All spot-on. But missing here is what else those around Jamie failed to see.
In reality, targeted violence is neither spontaneous nor impossible to anticipate. It is planned violence. And most perpetrators give off warning signs about their intent, often noticeable well in advance to people around them. Those “red flags” mark a window of time for potentially life-saving intervention by knowledgable experts.
One case that Graham cited for inspiring Adolescence was that of 15-year-old Holly Newton, who was stabbed to death in 2023 on a street in a small English town. Indeed, her 16-year-old ex-boyfriend had given off stark warning signs; after Newton broke up with him, according to her mother’s court testimony, he became jealously “obsessed with” and “controlling” toward her. Shortly before the ex-boyfriend killed Newton, she told a friend that he’d been stalking her and wasn’t going to stop.
Another recent fatal stabbing of a 15-year-old girl, in London, involved a 17-year-old killer with a history of attacking girls and carrying knives. He had seethed about a humiliating altercation with the victim and her friends, vowing to a peer that he wasn’t going to “let this slide.”
It’s important to acknowledge that these and other red flags can be difficult to recognize or understand, especially for victims and family members close to the situation.
The same can be true for parents of a killer. They also commonly are dismissed as monsters in the aftermath, but their role can shed light on prevention too. A void in this perspective was a prime reason why I spent more than two years investigating a notorious 2014 mass murder in Isla Vista, California—the case that put “incel” in the lexicon. Examining that devastating set of events to a large degree through the eyes of the 22-year-old killer’s mother, Chin Rodger, cast valuable new light on what really led to her son’s suicidal carnage.
Note, also, my repeated highlighting of suicidal killers. Suicidality is crucial terrain for warning behaviors that precede many mass shootings and other targeted violence. The Isla Vista case is Exhibit A. Years before Elliot Rodger caused devastation, he descended into suicidal despair and rage. One revelation from the extensive case evidence is that toxic incel forums gave Rodger opportunity to validate a revenge narrative that he had already been building to justify the taking of his own life.
The freshness of Adolescence is also in its focus on the killer’s parents. To what degree are they responsible for the crime? (Only the most extreme cases, such as the 2021 mass shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan, offer a clear answer to that question.) And are Jamie’s parents, who suffer heavily onscreen, also victims in their own right?
These are mind-opening questions heightened by a gripping drama—one arguably a little too heightened with Jamie’s apparent normalcy and stability. The idea is that anyone’s kid could now be vulnerable to online radicalization. That danger has grown, and it’s conceivable that a young teen like the fictional Jamie could plan and carry out lethal violence motivated by misogyny. But the contemporary history of targeted violence shows that an extreme case of this kind is likely also to be driven fundamentally by suicidal intent.
Over the past few years, online exploitation and radicalization of youth has expanded well beyond the incel phenomenon covered by Adolescence. Since 2023, top experts in threat assessment have told me about an escalation in cases linked to subcultures and sites that serve as gateways to violent extremist content. Networks known as “764,” “The Com,” and others have become hubs of horrifying material and criminal activity that previously would have been difficult to encounter beyond what’s known as the Dark web.
In March, and again in July, the FBI posted announcements to warn the public about this growing danger in the United States and globally. The bureau highlighted a deeply disturbing problem that has spread through more mainstream social media platforms, such as Discord and Telegram, and via gaming sites and other apps commonly used by young people: “These networks use threats, blackmail, and manipulation to coerce or extort victims into producing, sharing, or live-streaming acts of self-harm, animal cruelty, sexually explicit acts, and/or suicide. The footage is then circulated among members of the network to continue to extort victims and exert control over them.” The FBI has been pursuing at least 250 investigations involving these networks, NPR correspondent Odette Yousef reported in August.
According to a senior US law enforcement source familiar with the growing problem, there have been at least four cases in the US and Canada in which vulnerable young people were persuaded to livestream their own suicides. Provoking that outcome is seen as a top “flex” among perpetrators who seek to gain notoriety and criminal opportunity on the networks.
“In some of these cases you have to prosecute because of the nature of the offense, but prosecuting an 11-year-old or 12-year-old? That raises some difficult questions of its own.”
Other cases have involved young juvenile perpetrators engaging in serious criminal offenses that include child sexual abuse material, threatening and planning acts of violence, and beyond.
“In some of these cases you have to prosecute because of the nature of the offense,” the senior law enforcement source told me recently, “but prosecuting an 11-year-old or 12-year-old? That raises some difficult questions of its own.” The source described one recent case in which a young juvenile faced dozens of felony counts and was removed long-term from a rough family situation.
Perhaps no recent case has revealed more about this rising specter than the deadly school shooting that occurred in December 2024 at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin.
The 15-year-old perpetrator, Natalie Rupnow, who killed two people and injured six others before fatally shooting herself, had engaged extensively online with violent content and people focused on harm, including a fixation on previous attackers. Like other school and mass shooters, she displayed warning behaviors offline too, but her case was next-level with telltale online activity. She was in contact with a 20-year-old in California who authorities alleged in the aftermath had communicated with her about carrying out a mass attack with guns and explosives. Researchers at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism found that Rupnow had dozens of accounts on different platforms espousing racist, violent, and extremist views.
Those included her participation in a Telegram chat where a neo-Nazi in Turkey posted hateful content just before carrying out a stabbing at a mosque. The chat included a link to a livestream of the attack, and comments about “the success” of the attack that ADL researchers concluded were posted by Rupnow. In other writings, Rupnow credited the perpetrator in Turkey with inspiring her own violence to come.
In August, ADL extremism researchers published a detailed timeline showing how another suicidal school shooter, who struck about five weeks later in Tennessee, followed a similar trajectory involving these networks. Solomon Henderson, who killed one student and injured another before killing himself at Antioch High School in Nashville, interacted with an array of similar violent and extremist content, including through a forum called “WatchPeopleDie.”
In the weeks before Henderson opened fire, he learned that Rupnow had been following him prior to her shooting on the social media platform X. He wrote that she was a “saintress,” dedicated a Discord account to her he called “RupnowGroyper” (whose extended name refers to a youthful white supremacist community), and posted a TikTok video celebrating her.
This spring, law enforcement investigators further found that Rupnow had interacted extensively with 22-year-old Damien Allen of Florida, who possessed an arsenal of guns and was arrested and jailed without bond in May for allegedly plotting mass violence. The two communicated online for months before Rupnow carried out her December 2024 attack, according to authorities. They discussed violent plans, weapons, and tactical gear, and they celebrated ideas of violence together. An affidavit filed in Palm Beach County details a TikTok exchange between Rupnow and Allen from June 2024 in which Allen stated, “We go down together.” Rupnow replied, “Correct,” followed by “I love you.” To which Allen replied, “I love you more.”
Rupnow’s father, Jeffrey Rupnow, was charged in May for allegedly providing his underage daughter with the weapon she used in her attack and for contributing to child delinquency. (His attorney moved to have the case dismissed; a pre-trial conference is scheduled for late September.) The case continues a recent trend of seeking to hold parents criminally accountable in extreme cases of apparent neglect for warning signs from young attackers—signs found increasingly in their digital lives.
In summer 2024, the FBI’s Behavioral Threat Assessment Center, whose mission includes partnering with state and local authorities to prevent targeted violence, stepped up efforts to inform the public about warning behaviors and how to seek help. The FBI posted a list of “common concerning behaviors” and created a short video with examples of potentially worrisome communications. The campaign further included a list of research publications and information about tip lines and how to contact FBI field offices with concerns.
Deep into my investigation of the Isla Vista case, FBI unit chief Dr. Karie Gibson and other experts with the Behavioral Analysis Unit told me about research into what they have come to understand as a “thin line” separating suicidal and homicidal intent in many mass attackers. As Dr. Jack Rozel, another threat assessment expert and a leader in emergency psychiatric medicine described it, a growing recognition of those entwined risk factors points to a need for systemic change: “We have to find ways to push our legal and social systems to provide the authority and tools to better intervene.”
These insights come in an era when many policy experts and commentators are warning of a rising mental-health crisis among young people that appears to be exacerbated, or possibly even driven, by digital technology. The zeitgeist includes concern in particular about toxic content and alienation affecting boys and young men—although as Rupnow’s and other cases reaffirm, there is no useful demographic profile (gender, race, age) for predicting who might gravitate toward an act of targeted violence.
All of which underscores the broader achievement of Adolescence, not only as memorable storytelling but also in how it has drawn major attention to an emerging, urgent problem.
Who knows, but perhaps there could even be a second season: one that tells the story of a kid who shows troubling warning signs, and who gets some much-needed help before it’s too late.
