In the second episode of Adolescence, a kind of tricky thing happens that is really easy to miss. The episode is about the police coming to the school attended by both the perpetrator and victim of the stabbing to ask questions of some of the students and try to gather information about building a case against the boy, Jamie. The police are looking for the murder weapon, and think it might have been passed on to a friend. The episode is mostly about the perspective of the officers and the difficulty of getting kids to talk to them at all about what happened or why, even though all of the kids already seem to know more than the police officers do, largely because they have been communicating about it in emoji code on social media. Eventually the male detective’’s son, who is also a student at the school, gets a private moment to let his father in on the code, mostly because the son is getting embarrassed by how incompetent his father is looking in front of the whole school. I might do a later post about the necessity of having coded “kids only” language/means of communicating and how I think adults today might be blowing that aspect of social media out of perspective, but I think the more interesting thing to talk about in that episode, is the clear collusion that occurred and continues to occur with Jamie’s friends.
Because the show never does any voice over narration, and everything is presented from the perspective of the characters in front of the camera at that moment, there is a lot that goes unsaid in the show, or only gets hinted at or briefly mentioned. One of these is understanding the extent to which Jamie planned to murder this girl and that he did not do it alone. To make sure I am not making assumptions about things that other people don’t see, I will lay out, chronologically, what I saw presented as what happened leading to Jamie murdering his classmate Katie.
– Katie shares revealing pictures of herself and a friend with a boy in her school.
– The boy shares these pictures with enough other people that they go viral within the class.
– Jamie either becomes interested in Katie as a result of seeing the pictures, or already was interested in her, and decides to try to win her over romantically by appearing to be sympathetic and understanding of how unfair it is that the pictures were publicly shared.
– Katie sees through this trick and identifies Jamie as a creep, leading her to mock him, by calling him an incel.
– Jamie is very hurt by this, talks to his friends, and plots some kind of revenge. Some aspects of both Katie’s rejection and Jamie’s reaction is posted on social media and observed by most of their classmates.
– Exactly how much his friends know at this point is not really revealed, except that one of his friends, the one Jamie identifies as stupid, gives him a knife to use for his revenge plot. Maybe the friend thought he was just going to scare the girl, maybe he knew more, it is left very vague in the show.
– Jamie stalks the girl down and murders her very quickly, with almost no conversation before hand, as shown in the CCTV recording in the first episode. He stabs her multiple times and then flees, clearly not realizing that the parking lot had a camera on it.
– Some how Jamie gets home, in new clothes that are not covered in blood and without the murder weapon. The audience is not told how this happens although the police suspect that he went to a friend’s house and received help getting rid of evidence.
– The next morning Jamie is arrested.
I think one of the reasons why Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, has expressed interest in this show being watched in schools and discussed by youth and educators is because there are many points where other people could have intervened to stop this fictional murder from happening, and this kind of proactive thinking is at the heart of well-researched violence prevention programs. Like getting people to talk about the crime itself and the emotions around it is one important part of helping people be prepared not to participate in such actions, but talking about the situation from a broader social perspective also helps people see that this kind of violence isn’t just about the emotional state of the perpetrator, or showing young women what to look out for or how to protect themselves, but that an entire community enabled this violence to happen and could have done a lot more to prevent it.
This is why I think the second episode is about much more than just the police trying to find more evidence to convict Jaime of the crime, even though, from their perspective (which is the one the camera stays on for most of the episode), that is what their trip to the school is about.
Interestingly, and probably true in most real incidents of gender/sex-based violence amongst youth, the adults in this story were all pretty clueless and not in much of a position to identify the risk factors before it happened. Not the parents of either child (we think, we never see Katie or Katie’s parents to know how much of the situation she was bringing home) nor the teachers were going to be aware enough to figure this out. Even if Jaime’s parents had been more observant of Jamie’s social media presence, he was communicating in code that would have completely stumped them if they had seen the posts. Obviously they feel incredibly guilty when they realize that their boy had been the one to do it, and many of the other adults in the community around them are probably placing blame on them, because parents are supposed to be accountable for the actions of their children and take responsibility for teaching them not to be terrible people in the first place, but that kind of rhetoric is almost always just applied after something terrible has happened as a way to find someone to blame. Occasionally there are very specific, tale-tell signs that grown ups should be educating themselves to look out for and be prepared to get involved when we see them, but, I feel, an uncomfortable truth for many adults in the room is that part of raising kids, or being a part of their education and growth is preparing them to be active members of the various communities to which they will one day belong.
***when I say gender/sex-based violence, I am talking about sexual violence, domestic violence, and all violence that originates from one person feeling like another person has an obligation to treat them a specific way because of their genders, sexes, or sexualities. So it also includes misogynistic violence, homophobia, and violence against transpeople. It is maybe a little awkward of a thing to write out/say, but it is more specific than just saying violence as a whole.***
Definitely in the case presented on the show adolescence, it is the youth community around Jamie and Katie that were most powerfully situated to do something to change the outcome, but also were clearly not being prepared by their families or the social institutions around them to do so. Jamie’s friends were active participants in enabling the violence that occurred, and clearly knew it afterwards, as they react by pulling a fire alarm when the police do arrive at the school to learn more, and don’t provide any useful information until cornered and essentially tortured to reveal it (there is no Television better than the righteous police office crossing the boundaries of legality to get information that might not even be necessary for their case, but that we know the interrogated person has). The rest of the school was overly comfortable sitting in the “innocent bystander” role, eating their pop corn and gossip about the entire situation as it unfolded, through Katie’s murder.
Bystander intervention training was pretty much my area of focus in violence prevention work, and is still the direct action and preparation for action that I think can have the most positive effect on ending and minimizing the threat of gender/sex-based violence. There are a lot of reasons why kids don’t feel comfortable stepping into an active bystander role, and why a lot of adults feel uncomfortable letting them, but I think that is a deep enough topic for its own future post. So all I will say is that a more active bystander intervention model could have had the potential to empower one or more of the youth witnessing this situation into taking positive action that could have stopped it from escalating. I will also go over personal experiences with that kind of thing from my youth in a future post as well. I will say that I agree with Starmer that the show Adolescence could be used as a conversation starter that could lead youth to the development of bystander intervention strategies as well as a stronger understanding of what kinds of behaviors can escalate to unthinkable violence when no one does anything to stop it. Maybe in England, there is a better institutional structure to facilitate that happening, but it feels like in the US, any attempt to get that conversation started at institutional levels is going to be met with extreme patriarchal, misogynistic responses masquerading as protectionism for children. “How DARE you think MY CHILD needs to be exposed to such horrific ideas, or be prepared to respond to them! If anyone is going to teach my kids about sexual and domestic violence (or even worse, gender-violence)! If they are going to learn about it, it is going to be from sneaking off to consume media behind my back, or worse, experience it first hand and have no idea how to talk about it or to whom!”