When I watched the Netflix ‘Adolescence’ with my fifteen-year-old grand-daughter, I was reminded of James Gilligan’s book, ‘Violence: Reflections on our Deadliest Epidemic’ (pub.1997).
Gilligan was a prison psychiatrist and carried out his research among men convicted of murder. He concluded that shame is the key cause of violence – and the greater the shame, the more murderous is the violence. He asked each prisoner on a full-life tariff why they had killed and their answers were nearly always along the lines of ‘He/She dissed (disrespected) me. What else could I do?’
On the basis of these responses, Gilligan suggested that not only murder, but all violence, is caused by what he referred to as ‘secret shame’.
Secrecy implies that one is ashamed of feeling shame – and yet the shame that is experienced is torturingly painful and threatens the death of the self. The idea of honour and revenge is a much-vaunted theme – and yet it is often the way of hiding shame rather than dealing with it in any direct way.
Gilligan commented that for his cohort of male offenders, the worst shame was generated by sexual humiliation.
This Attachment and Trauma training programme provides schools with the tools they need to be attachment and trauma aware.
So I thought of this when I watched Jamie, the thirteen-year-old protagonist, erupt in rage at the psychologist who had come to make an independent assessment of his mental state; she was skilful in engaging with him and prompted him to an admission that Katie (the murdered girl) had rebuffed his invitation to take her to the fair, telling him, ‘I’m not that desperate.’ She had also sent him an Instagram message that contained a series of emojis, taunting him.
They made no sense to DI Luke Bascombe, the detective investigating the murder and looking for a motive. But his son, Adam, also at the same school as Jamie and Katie, offered to decode the messages they contained. And they were vicious attacks on Jamie’s masculinity and his ability to attract girls – suggesting he was an incel– and always would be.
Jamie saw himself as ugly – and admitted this to the psychologist. When she tried to explore other perceptions - around masculinity and his relationship with his father - he initially refused to engage and became very defensive.
But then he shared with her that his father had wanted him to be good at sport and had enrolled him in a football club. But Jamie wasn’t sporty and his failures on the football field in front of watching parents humiliated him – and he observed how his father was similarly shamed - and would turn away from watching the game when he ‘messed up’.
Katie, Jamie’s victim, had also suffered sexual humiliation. She had sent a photo of herself, topless, to a boy in the school and he had circulated it around his friendship group. Jamie commented, somewhat scornfully, that she was ‘flat-chested’ while looking at his assessor who was similarly not well-endowed in that area. It isn’t difficult to see why Katie would then turn on Jamie and seek to humiliate him in the same way as she herself had been humiliated.
James Gilligan explored and charted the territory of sexual humiliation that adult men had suffered which had led them to commit horrific crimes. It was limited territory contained within a sink-hole of society where child abuse happened and the shame of those abused boys occasionally resurfaced in their adult relationships and overwhelmed them, prompting murder.
I suspect that if Gilligan was writing now – thirty years after his original research – he would be painting a far bleaker, more unboundaried, landscape. So, for example, allegations of sexual violence have been made by children in almost 1,700 primary schools with just over half of all offenders being children themselves - compared with a third ten years ago - according to the report by the charity, Everyone’s Invited, published in March this year (2025). (I tried to identify data from 30 years ago and it is not available; it was not the children who were interviewed about sexual violence in the last century – but their parents – and we now understand that the information may therefore be contaminated by parental perceptions and defences).
By the age of eleven, 27% of children have also viewed pornography (2023, Children’s Commissioner) - another piece of data providing some insight into the world that children inhabit.
A lot of the reviews of ‘Adolescence’ have focused solely on the misogyny that Jamie and his male peers exhibit. But what is going on here seems to be far more complex and enmeshed with growing an identity that survives the potential shamings of their journey through adolescence and conforms to certain perceptions of masculinity which provide a passport to peer acceptance. For some boys, the expectations that are imposed on them are unachievable – and they may resort to violence as a way of dealing with feelings of shame that might otherwise be unmanageable.
James Gilligan’s ‘epidemic’ has escalated into a pandemic, thanks primarily to the digital world’s ‘manosphere’ and social media. The survey that ‘Everyone’s Invited’ conducted included one nine-year-old boy who named Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed misogynist influencer, as his role model in a school project. Tate has boasted about punching and beating women. A 2023 You-Gov poll found that one in six boys aged 6-15 had a positive view of Tate. Jamie mentions him in his interview in Episode 2.
Had Jamie not made his frenzied attack on Katie, repeatedly stabbing her, his ego may not have survived, overwhelmed by the ridicule she heaped on him in full view of all those with access to her ‘insta’ posts. Her attack was vicious and she had mortified (literally means ‘deadened’!) him by her salvo of emojis. His repeated response to both his father and the police was that he had ‘done nothing wrong’. Eddie assumed that meant his son was innocent of the murder, whereas I suspect Jamie meant that his actions were justified, given the circumstances of his situation.
When I asked my grand-daughter why she thought Jamie killed Katie, she told me that he probably felt he had no choice; his mates would have been egging him on (one of them, Ryan, provided the murder weapon, if you remember) – and he would have lost face (been further humiliated) if he had come back without having done something to prove his masculinity. I stifled the response that immediately came to mind (‘Of course he had a choice – he just made the wrong one!’) and instead we talked a bit more about the pressures on Jamie – and on Katie.
I was left reflecting that if we are to stem the flow of this violence and limit the growing numbers of incel recruits – and those named incels by their detractors - then parental figures – whether in schools or in family homes – need to inform themselves about what is online and what the pressures on their children are.
So on the one hand, they have to be aware of porn addiction, strangulation and sexual violence – and be able to air their concerns to their children in a way that engages them, rather than shuts them down. On the other hand, they need to be super-sensitive to the toxic shame that some children are drowning in because they don’t conform to the stereotypes of masculinity or femininity laid down online, in social media posts and TikTok feeds – and they have to find ways of talking comfortably with their children about a sexual intimacy that is loving and consensual.
