The chilling truth about young killers
National Post, 21 September 2025
Shocking U.K. series 'Adolescence' will make you want to seize your child's computer
It’s possible that during his state visit to the United Kingdom this week, President Donald Trump’s hosts may have talked to him about Adolescence. The four-episode British television program of that name won the Emmy Award for outstanding limited series just days before his arrival, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer led a national symposium prompted by it when it was released in March.
As Trump grieves the murder of his friend Charlie Kirk, he may well wonder how a young man growing up in a normal, respectable home turned into an assassin. Early reports about Kirk’s alleged killer indicate that he was saturated in a toxic online world. His parents were conventionally religious. He was radicalized online in what is now, ominously, conventional. They had no idea. That phenomenon is not uniquely American, and the U.K. drama attempted to explain its British expression.
In Canada, as Adolescence was collecting its Emmys, news came that several homeless men were viciously assaulted in downtown Toronto a fortnight previous, including a 62-year-old who succumbed to his injuries after being savagely beaten with a hammer. Two men have been charged in his murder. Men? One barely, the 20-year-old. The other suspect is a 12-year-old boy. Would anyone be surprised if he had developed online an affinity for beating sixty-something strangers to death?
Adolescence was created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, the latter of whom also played the role of the protagonist’s father, a 13-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a girl from his school. The parents are initially horrified and bewildered that the police could have gotten it all so wrong. Then the police show them video footage of their son stabbing the girl to death.
Graham conceived Adolescence as an exploration of recent lethal stabbings in the U.K. by young boys. His exploration shook British society, as Adolescence, over only four hours, depicts the psychological hellscape that a great many British youth inhabit online, with the natural anxieties, frictions and factions of the schoolyard ramped up from teasing and bullying to an all-consuming atmosphere of ever-increasing isolation, agitation, fear and hatred. The progression (degradation) is chilling and disturbing to watch, as that alternative reality meets actual reality. The result is bloody.
Millions of Britons recognized that a significant portrait was being painted, and most were astonished and agonized by what it portrayed. Starmer watched the series with his son and daughter, and they confirmed for him the truth of what they saw. Adolescence was made available to be shown free in schools, as a way of warning students against a clear and present danger — and, perhaps more important, opening the eyes of teachers and parents to what is corrupting their students and children right under their noses.
It all makes for harrowing viewing. The language is rough, the emotions are raw, the performances riveting, revealing an alternative reality that is utterly repellant. Parents need to watch, even if their younger children should not. They need to discover what may well be happening to their 13-year-olds, holed up in their bedrooms on their laptops and everywhere else on their phones.
The final scenes are heartbreaking. A year after the murder, the parents are tormented by pain and guilt. How could they not have known what was happening? They blame themselves and attempt to comfort each other. They belatedly realize that their son’s endless hours online, unsupervised, were (unwittingly) an act of gross parental negligence. They had no idea that they were, in fact, terrible parents. They realize it at the end, and the realization is overwhelming, unbearable.
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