Cries Unheard

Adolescence's false equivalence between the UK knife epidemic and the manosphere.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Margaret Atwood.

Adolescence is primarily seen through the eyes of adults: police officers, teachers, a psychologist and a father. The through line is (understandably) adult incomprehension and incredulity: how can a thirteen-year-old boy murder a thirteen-year-old girl? Although the Netflix miniseries is not based on a true story, it is inspired by a series of real life events: a horrifying spate of brutal child murders amidst Britain's escalating knife crime epidemic. As co-writer (and lead actor) Stephen Graham observes

There was an incident where a young boy stabbed a girl. It shocked me. I was thinking, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What’s the inciting incident here?’ And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again. I really just wanted to shine a light on it, and ask, ‘Why is this happening today? What’s going on? How have we come to this?’

Graham elaborates further

The idea came as – over the past 10 years or so – we've seen an epidemic of knife crime amongst young lads, up and down the country. And for me, there were certain instances that really stuck out where young boys were killing young girls.

We're entering this kind of era where there was, like, four, five, six, seven cases of young boys – and I'm going to call them young boys, they're not men – stabbing girls to death.

And, you know, that beautiful saying, "It takes a takes a village to raise a child", I just wanted to create something that kind of looked at it from that perspective, but also looked at it like, look, maybe we are all slightly accountable in some way, be that parents, be that school, be that government, community, society.

Graham’s paternal communalism helps contextualise the series thematic concerns. The show’s title is a slight misnomer or misdirection. Adolescence is not so much concerned about the trials and tribulations of adolescence or a male adolescent struggling with the violent upheavals of psychosocial developments. Its primary concern is the adult world’s inability to control, understand or protect its own children.

The situation has gotten so out of hand that there have been calls to ban kitchen knives with sharp points. Adolescence has clearly struck a nerve. The critically acclaimed UK series is a surprising international hit that has penetrated the body politic.

Adolescence, then, has galvanised the conversation attempting to address the root causes of the knife violence crisis amongst young people. Although its approach might be heartfelt and urgent, Adolescence too conveniently identifies the fundamental reasons for a widespread and diffused social problem. Adolescence is anxious to point the finger at toxic masculinity in the digital form of the manosphere and incel subculture.

If the spate of cited killings are any indication, however, there is no unifying thread or single motivating factor other than emotionally dysregulated teenagers predisposed towards inexplicable violence.

The show’s two writers (Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham) have therefore reverse engineered an explanation to make sense of a phenomenon that implicates broader social factors. Their avowed attempt to avoid systemic issues related to (say) race, class, drugs, mental health, gang violence, social disadvantage, gender norms and/or mass media contagions fail to align with the statistics - male adolescents are more likely to be stabbed to death by other young men living in the toxic social environments that adults create around children, who then become both the perpetrators and victims.

Adolescence’s conflation of two separate issues - the knife violence crisis amongst young people and incel ideology - is not the result of investigative journalism, empirical data or psychological assessments. The series needed a reason for their young man to kill a young woman, and Adolescence found what it was looking for online. Adolescence’s writers, however, have allowed themselves to be the victims (and perpetrators) of media bias. Inceldom’s incitements to violence are gender-neutral and typically involve vice signalling .¹

This is not to imply that Thorne and Graham have falsified reality by acknowledging the negative influence of the manosphere or the potential threat of incel culture to women. Nor do we want to minimise the horror of the increasing prevalence of young boys stabbing young girls to death. It is difficult not to notice, however, the gendered nature of their concerns - the show’s concerned fathers are particularly alarmed by the fact that young boys are now stabbing young girls to death too.

If the homicide statistics by gender are a true measure, young boys appear to be modelling themselves upon adult males similarly struggling with emotional regulation or conflict resolution.

The idea that the rise in urban violence - patterns and incidences - can be meaningfully located in cyberspace is fanciful thinking, and merely displaces the real explanations elsewhere. Nonetheless, it would be misplaced to cast aspersions on the integrity of Adolescence’s dramatic intervention : moral urgency and sincerely felt concerns infuse every frame.

We are more highlighting the fact that Adolescence’s adult creators have sought refuge in an adolescent explanation.

The series single take scenes - designed to heighten emotion and confusion - call into question Adolescence’s capacity to explain (away) the root causes of the knife violence crisis amongst young people. The long single takes might provide viewers with incredibly intense and intimate experiences, but the immersive scenes also highlight Adolescence’s main shortcoming: the series mode of address is white middle class moral panic.

If (say) actor and activist Idris Elba had approached Thorne instead - Elba launched the Don't Stop Your Future campaign in January 2024 and presented the Our Knife Crime Crisis BBC documentary in January 2025 - we would have gotten a very different longitudinal take on youth knife violence.

The problem of looking for easy or ready-made explanations in diametrically opposed folk devils like Andrew Tate or Eliot Rodgers is perhaps nowhere better exemplified than the text Thorne cites as the series main inspiration - Gitta Sereny’s 1998 nonfiction novel Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill.

Thorne (like Sereny) does not want us to question whether Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) really killed Katie Leonard. That question was answered for viewers by the end of the first of four episodes (despite also wanting us to remain in a state of disbelief or false hope about his possible innocence right up until the end). Following the lead of Cries Unheard

Telling a drama that’s a why-done-it, rather than a whodunit, hopefully engages people in different questions. “Questions like, ‘What’s going on within our teenage boys?’ Phil, Stephen, and I are looking at masculinity — thinking about ourselves as men, the kinds of fathers, partners, and friends we are, and questioning with some intensity who we are as people.

The difficulty is that Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill is a story about an ‘evil’ eleven-year-old girl (Mary Bell) killing two preschool-age boys in 1968 - indicating that child killers are not gender-specific or a recent phenomenon. The 1998 book also has the benefit of historical distance. Unlike Adolescence, it is not defined by increasing fear and confusion at an encroaching threat to the moral order or social fabric.² Cries Unheard’s search for an explanation remains perplexed, interrogative and reflexive. As the following quote illustrates, Sereny’s ‘why-done-it’ is also much more interested in seeing the world through the young female killer’s eyes.

If anyone could ever help us one day to understand, firstly, what can bring a young child to the point of murder, and second, what needs to or can be done with and for such children, then with that strange intelligence of hers which I assumed would endure, Mary would be able to. I always thought the day would come when she herself, without outside pressure, would want to tell her story.

There, in that small girl I sensed not evil but some kind of deep and hidden distress.

Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill - The Story of Mary Bell, p.42 and 479.

It’s also telling that Adolescence doesn’t attempt to see the murder through the eyes of the young female victim either. Thorne claimed that Katie’s story wasn’t a man’s story to tell and that adult men wouldn’t be able to rise to the occasion of seeing the world through a young woman’s eyes. Thorne, however, is being slightly disingenuous here. The remarkably prolific (and talented) Thorne is more than capable of seeing the world through a young woman’s eyes - see, for example, His Dark Materials, The Secret Garden and Enola Holmes. The truth is that an episode portraying a teenage girl publicaly emasculating a teenage boy would have encouraged more victim blaming or accusations that she was asking for it.

While the morally panicked Adolescence succeeds in portraying the divide between adolescents and adults, it errs by displacing the root cause onto monuments built to arrested development (the manosophere). It’s erected structures or memorials are the symptoms and not the (primary) cause of external social problems and pressures - although these culturally diverse online spaces obviously remain an integral part of the feedback loop threatening the outside world.

Specifically, Adolescence’s ‘why-done-it’ strategically ignores the fact that the manosphere is caught up in its own moral panics and search for folk devils - in their case, they are panicked about the rise of empowered and selective women. These frightened and confused men seek refuge in safe spaces to address shared feelings of powerlessness and helplessness at a society undergoing its own painful transitions into adulthood (or stages of development mirroring the storms and stresses of adolescence).

The real question is why young boys have become increasingly susceptible to the dogmatic slumbers of anti-feminist and misogynistic worldviews: why are older men’s cries being heard and amplified by teenage boys? It is also worth stressing that the manosphere is not as socially aberrant as woke media elites lead us to believe. These ‘real’ or ‘true’ men have merely taken gender socialisation to its logical extreme.³

Nor is the manosphere some homogenous monolith or a singular, centralized movement. Like the outside world it rails against, the manosphere is a variegated or stratified terrain. It is marked by social divisions, ideological differences and competing subcultures along political, racial, religious, and/or socioeconomic lines.

We are obviously not interested in engaging in a culture war about gender roles, expectations and behaviour here - our concern remains Adolescence’s cries for help. It is therefore important to hear the ways it cries out.

Adolescence begins and ends in a family home. A police raid culminates in the devastated parents feeling guilty for their son’s horrific crime. Although Adolescence spans a year in the Miller family’s life, the miniseries is structured around extended ‘snap shots’ of pivotal moments in real time. During the course of four episodes - or four select hours - we will visit a police station, a secondary school, a secure training centre and a broken home. Each of the episodes is intended to provide an intense and intimate look at what it feels like for a family member to be suddenly accused of a violent crime. The accused child is not the only person in denial. Social realism - or portraiture - is Adolescence’s overarching goal. Viewers thereby experience each parent’s worst nightmare: a home invasion that results in state sanctioned kidnapping and incarceration. While each episode plays an integral part in Adolescence’s social portrait, the third episode is the series lynchpin and will become our focal point.

A breakdown of the family’s break down.

Episode 1: The police raid establishes from the outset that we are about to enter a broken home. A terrified family have their front door broken down and their personal space invaded by forces beyond their understanding or control. The episode is meant to instil cognitive dissonance and terror in the audience too. The family’s scared – and innocent looking boy - has just been ‘arrested on suspicion of murder’. We will also suspect that the police have made a terrible mistake or have gotten the wrong house: ‘there is no way that he has done this!’ During the police interrogation, Jamie will also continue to protest his innocence. Jamie appears to be more interested in convincing his father than the police – he appears to think his father can protect him from the other adults in the room . When CCTV footage seems to confirm that Jamie has stabbed a young girl to death, the audience will similarly recoil in disbelief and horror.

Episode 2: The police officers visit Jamie and Katie’s school to try and establish a motive and find the murder weapon. The school visit, however, is really just a pretext to show us that overwhelmed and understaffed teachers neither control or understand unruly teenagers. The staffing crisis - overworked and underpaid teachers - means that the education system is failing everyone. The school is more like a ‘holding pen’ than a learning environment – something to temporarily confine or process livestock before the animals can be moved onto another location for slaughter and consumption. During their tour of the school, one of the police officers encounters his embarrassed son. ‘You’re not reading what they’re doing’ online he says to his ‘blundering’ father. His son helps his clueless father by decoding emoji symbols used on Katie’s Instagram account. It is revealed that Katie had been cyberbullying Jamie in front of the whole school. She had turned him into a public laughing stock by insinuating that he would remain an incel for the rest of his life.

Episode 3: A female forensic psychologist visits Jamie in a human holding pen (a youth detention centre prior to trial), and is tasked with making a psychological assessment. Her main task is to ‘understand his understanding’ of the situation. During their heated session, they discuss what it means to be a man and Jamie inadvertently reveals his hand.

Episode 4: Thirteen months later, the father’s van is defaced by teenage boys who publicly brand him a nonce (paedophile or weak man). This family man has become an easy target in the neighbourhood – presumably the result of neighbours speculating about the reasons Eddie’s son turned out so bad. Eddie goes to the hardware store to try and reclaim his good name or manhood. His loving wife (Manda) and daughter (Lisa) provide emotional support by accompanying the agitated man to the store. The young paint salesman recognises him and expresses his support for an unfairly accused Jamie. On their way home, Jamie rings his father to tell him that he is going to plead guilty to murder.

The ‘day in the life’ sequence is intended to serve three dramatic purposes: illustrate that the devasted family is barely holding things together as they try to move on with their lives, there is no escaping the shame of Jamie’s horrific crime and the father is predisposed towards uncontrollable anger. The family dynamic stresses the relationship between nature (biology) and nurture (environment), or the theme the ‘apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree’ in their backyard. When Eddie asks his wife ‘how did we make her?’ she replies ‘the same way we made him’.

The question is meant to illustrate the mystery of childhood development and adult fears that parents might have little control over how their children turn out. There is no real mystery here though: mother and daughter clearly share the same personality and behavioural traits, and help bring out the best in their distressed father. Nonetheless, both parents can’t help but blame themselves for failing to notice – let alone police – their son’s exposure to dangerous outside forces within the safety of their own home. ‘He never left his room’ says his mother, ‘He’d come home, slam the door, straight up the stairs on the computer.’ The series ends with a symbol of lost innocence: a crying man tucking his son’s teddy bear in for the night.

Episode 3:

The outstanding third episode calls into question any notion of ‘childhood innocence’. The idea that children are somehow innocent - inherently good or untouched by the adult world – is put to bed just by speaking to one of them. As the conversation between psychologist and accused makes clear, children are constantly measuring themselves – and being measured against – given social standards and reference groups. Standards for comparison is the way adolescents determine their place in the world or within the pecking order. Social comparisons thereby provide a moral compass in which to navigate (evaluate, determine) different social environments, interactions and behaviours.

Their conversation confirms that adolescence is a period of consolidation and accommodation that invariably occurs by way of an identity crisis, or the attempt to reconcile social standards and expectations with personal needs and goals. Adolescents would ideally form and consolidate their identities within regulated social environments (school and the family) and social networks (relationship with adults and peers). During the transitional phase between childhood and adulthood , teenagers should therefore come into their own by internalising social roles, norms and behaviours that align with their personal temperaments, abilities and traits. Nonetheless, this crucial identity-formation stage is marked by a tension between relatively stable and fixed sources of normativity (prescribed rules and roles) and unfolding normative developments (psychological and physical upheavals) that can challenge authority, encourage risky behaviour or negatively impact self-esteem.

The episode – perhaps inadvertently – indicates that the predisposition to violence might also be environmental. Before Briony (Erin Doherty) talks to Jamie, we discover that this previously ‘weak’ boy - frequently bullied by boys and girls alike at school - has adapted to his new male environment by violently attacking another boy. It’s difficult to know if he’s learnt to stand up for himself since murdering a young girl or if he’s just targeted a weaker boy to assert his manhood and make himself more ‘attractive’ to the other boys. Either way, the holding pen is clearly always near boiling point – the ‘mad house’ is filled with the screams of other young boys.

During their fraught session, we also witness gender roles and dynamics play out. Their conversation is characterised by power plays, or shifting power dynamics that frequently destabilise both of them. Although Jamie is clearly trying to impress this ‘dead pretty’ woman, he also tries to assert dominance when he loses control of the situation or the direction of their conversation. During these moments, he is genuinely intimidating. This little boy seems to grow in physical stature when he gets angry with (or stands over) the lovely woman that had just brought him a cheese sandwich and a hot chocolate with marshmallows. ‘You do not control what I do! Get that in that fucking little head of yours!’ He is also quick to make a hasty retreat back into childhood when a bigger man (guard) appears. “I shouted. ‘I’m sorry. Can I have another hot chocolate, please?’ he asks her.

There are times when he also seems to be flirting with her, but (mostly) he just desperately wants another person to like him. Feelings of sexual inadequacy are mixed with sexual attraction (or possibility), and he appears to see the psychologist as a surrogate mother and potential girlfriend. When she reveals that this will be their last session together, his angry reaction is particularly telling: he feels a mixture of personal heartbreak (as if she is breaking up with him) and child abandonment (she can’t leave him here like this).

It’s no coincidence, then, that the third episode foregrounds a relationship between a young boy and an older woman. We are given a front seat to developing – if confused - sexual attitudes and behaviour. The question, however, is his own understanding of a grave situation, and the episode interrogates the head space of a teenage murderer. Despite evidence to the contrary, Jamie is still denying that he killed Katie. ‘I should have killed her but I didn’t’. It’s possible, however, that he can’t even admit the awful truth to himself: that would be the one bitter pill difficult to swallow. The psychologist, however, just wants to ‘understand his understanding’, and that includes getting a sense of what it means to be a man and whether he thinks women might find him attractive.

The conversation contextualises Jamie’s and Katie’s ‘relationship’, and their respective places within the social order. Jamie’s poor self-esteem – perceived ‘ugliness’ and ‘weakness’ – doesn’t prevent him from being interpersonally manipulative or exploitative. Significantly, the apparently shared belief that he is ‘ugly’ necessitates manipulative and exploitative behaviour. The 80/20 dating rule - 80 per cent of women are attracted to 20 per cent of men (the most attractive or masculine men) misappropriated from the economic law of the vital few or factor sparsity - prescribes all men to manipulate women into liking them.

Jamie therefore knows a good opportunity when he sees one: preying on a humiliated and vulnerable young girl will level the playing field for him. Specifically, we learn that the ‘bullying bitch’ was also the victim of cyberbullying after she sent a solicited topless photo of herself to another boy. She had left herself exposed to public ridicule when making the mistake of trusting a teenage boy with this private image – even other teenage girls were laughing at her indiscretion and flat chest. The internet had taught him that he could improve his social chances and/or standing by taking advantage of her sudden weakness. So he pretended to offer Katie emotional support in the hope that she would go out with him. ‘I thought she might be weak cause everyone was calling her a slag. I just thought that when she was that weak, she might like me. It’s clever, don’t you think?’

As awful as this sounds, it is only appropriate to sound the alarm about a curiously underdeveloped theme. Adolescence nearly buries the lead – this episode makes it pretty clear that teenage girls are equally versed in the vernacular of the manosphere, and will use alleged rules of attraction against men outside their perceived league. Katie is so offended by the prospect that a designated incel would approach her in private – ‘I’m not that desperate’ – that she attempts to put the upstart back in his rightful place by publicly humiliating him in turn. It is also clear that Katie was trying to regain her social standing – or seek peer approval - by picking on an easy target in front of all the other teenage boys and girls. As far as Jamie was concerned, though, he was only asserting his manhood when repeatedly penetrating Katie with a knife – and he also sees himself acting on behalf of all aggrieved men when restoring an unfair gender imbalance with a horrific act of violence.

All said and done, episode 3 succeeds because it provides insight into the way adolescents have learnt to see themselves and each other. Nonetheless, the perceived connection between youth knife violence and incel ideology remains tenuous at best. Gender based violence predates the internet – men have been disproportionally killing women (and other men) prior to their access to the manosphere. Adolescence really explores different causes of toxic behaviour. It successfully establishes the connection between an unregulated internet and dysregulated teenagers, or the way terminally online adolescents try to regulate each other with emotional violence.

1. As Renske van der Veer observes in Analysing Personal Accounts of Perpetrators of Incel Violence: What Do They Want and Who Do They Target?, incels direct their animus towards men, women and society as a whole. Specifically,

By their own admission, incels generally tend to feel unfairly treated and to suffer from a self-perceived sense of illegitimacy, in more than one way. They classify society according to looks and genetic disposition and use rankings to divide people in categories. They are convinced that they themselves, as other incels, are on the low end of the scale, making it impossible for them to acquire or maintain relationships. This sense of illegitimacy that they are experiencing is key to their belief system.

If we close-read the writings that perpetrators have left behind, we cannot deny that there are differences between their own take on their belief systems and their intentions, and the current description of the incel phenomenon in the academic discourse and mainstream discussions.

They themselves clearly describe that they targeted men too, whereas in mainstream discussions on incel violence, the notion that only women are victims of incel violence is prevalent.

It seems like there is a general acceptance that incel violence always targets women and thus, that only violence aimed at women can be labelled incel violence. But this type of violence doesn’t just target women. It also targets men, and society on the whole.

(Furthermore) women cannot be ruled out as potential perpetrators.

There is a growing community of women who self-define as incels. The male incel community does not accept the fact that women can self-define as incels—this does not fit their worldview in which all women can always have sex and relations, no matter their appearance, meaning they cannot be involuntarily celibate, only voluntarily. Nevertheless, women who define themselves as incels—they often refer to themselves as femcels—adhere to a same belief system as their male counterpart: they classify society in terms of attractiveness, and feel they are at the far low end of that scale, leading to an inability to have relationships or sex.

Though even the fringes of the female incel community seem less aggressive than the fringes of the male incel community, it is unwise to rule out the potentially dangerous effects ‘inceldom’ can have on women—it has the same radicalizing potential.

See also Melissa de Roos’ The Angry Echo Chamber: A Study of Extremist and Emotional Language Changes in Incel Communities Over Time to underline the fact that there is a performative dimension to their misogynistic attitudes and violent incitements. Specifically, these angry echo chambers speak more to group affiliation and/or participation that converges around a shared marginalised identity characterised by anger, anxiety, depression and/or loneliness. It goes without saying that the frequently expressed attitudes or incitements have thus far led to (relatively) infrequent violent attacks upon men and women.

2. Sereny nonetheless notes in a 1998 introduction (p.12) that could have been written in 1968 or 2025.

Indeed, juvenile crime robbery, arson, assault with weapons, rape, manslaughter and murder (often committed by ever younger children) has increased to such an extent in all of the western world that many enlightened people are asking serious questions.

Have we any idea, thinking people are asking sociologists, psychiatrists, lawyers, judges and serious journalists, why children are becoming so violent? Do they understand the consequences of their actions? Do they know that death is final? And to what extent is their exposure to sex and violence in society, to what extent indeed are people in their immediate environment such as parents or parent substitutes, to blame?

It was in a search for these answers, basing my exploration on the life and the experiences of one such former child whom, with her consent, I quite deliberately used as an example or a symbol of many others, that I wrote Cries Unheard. The central account here, the story as Mary Bell told it to me, is not intended by me or her to be the story of her crimes, but to be rather a document which might serve as an incentive to all of us who care about children’s well-being to make their lives better. Whether it be parents or young would-be parents, neighbours, social workers, teachers, judges and advocates, police or government officials, if Mary’s painful disclosures of a suffering childhood and an appallingly mismanaged adolescence in detention can persuade us to learn how to detect young children’s distress, however hidden, and hear their cries, however faint, we might eventually be in a position to prevent children from offending rather than as is essentially happening all over the western world both inappropriately prosecuting and in aptly punishing them when they do.

3. See David D. Gilmore’s anthropological study Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity to highlight the fact that certain masculine values or traits – protect, provide and procreate - appear to be transcultural. Specifically,

this book is about the way people in different cultures conceive and experience manhood, which I will define here simply as the approved way of being an adult male in any given society. More specifically it is about why people in so many places regard the state of being a "real man" or "true man" as uncertain or precarious, a prize to be won or wrested through struggle, and why so many societies build up an elusive or exclusionary image of manhood through cultural sanctions, ritual, or trials of skill and endurance.

In keeping with the venerable tradition of culture sampling in anthropology, I have tried to provide extended cases of male ideologies from each of the basic socioeconomic types or categories recognized in contemporary culture theory. There are examples from hunting-gathering bands, horticultural and pastoral tribes, peasants, and postindustrial civilizations, in no particular order and without any evolutionary framework in mind. All the inhabited continents are represented by ethnographic examples (again in no particular order), and there are examples of manly ideals from warrior and pacifist societies, from egalitarian and stratified ones, and from matrilineal, patrilineal, and bilateral kinship systems.

I argue that manhood ideals make an indispensable contribution both to the continuity of social systems and to the psychological integration of men into their community. I regard these phenomena not as givens, but as part of the existential "problem of order" that all societies must solve by encouraging people to act in certain ways, ways that facilitate both individual development and group adaptation. Gender roles represent one of these problem-solving behaviors.

All societies distinguish between male and female; all societies also provide institutionalized sex-appropriate roles for adult men and women…the individual must make a life choice of identity and abide by prescribed rules of sexual comportment. In addition, most societies hold consensual ideals—guiding or admonitory images— for conventional masculinity and femininity by which individuals are judged worthy members of one or the other sex and are evaluated more generally as moral actors. Such ideal statuses and their attendant images, or models, often become psychic anchors, or psychological identities, for most individuals, serving as a basis for self-perception and self-esteem. (pp.2-9).