We can't afford to take our finger off the pulse!

February 2025

Pretty much everyone across the planet is talking about Adolescence. The latest crime drama mini-series on Netflix coming out of Britain, delves into the impact the murder of a thirteen-year-old girl has on an English town. What is most concerning, is the murder is carried out by a thirteen-year-old boy and classmate of the victim. The horrific nature of the crime and the events leading up to the violent murder of the girl sheds light on the very concerning under-current juveniles across the planet are experiencing as a result of their exposure to the internet. In particular, the mini-series forces the viewer to confront the impact an uncontrolled and unregulated online world can have on a young mind.

I feel this brilliantly written series must be a wake-up call to parents as to what can happen when we take no active role in the online world of our children.

Jamie and Katie are both thirteen and in the same year at school. Though they are not friends, they do cross paths online from time to time. At some time in the recent past, Katie had sent a nude to a boy at school. Sadly, that boy distributed her topless image to a number of mates at the school. Unfortunately, this is an occurrence I encounter almost daily in my world of online safety. Katie was therefore categorised as a result of that error of judgement. A response sadly promoted by the callous design of the internet, especially Social Media and the porn industry.

In her time of vulnerability, Jamie asks Katie out, believing that her weakness would lead to her accepting his offer of a relationship. Katie rejects his approach and then acts to call him out online amongst peers. In an Instagram post viewed and commented on by others at school, Katie accuses Jamie of being an "incel". This comment and the subsequent online interactions angers Jamie, so he spends an evening walking around the town attempting to find Katie and confront her. After walking the streets for a few hours, Jamie catches up with Katie late in the evening. Within only seconds of the approach, as shown in CCTV footage, Katie is stabbed to death by Jamie in a violent rage. The mini-series starts with the police forcing entry to Jamie’s parents’ home.

In the four episode show, viewers are taken deep into the sub-culture of juvenile social media use and shown in raw detail the impact the online world can have and is having on this generation of youth, especially young boys. The covers are ripped off a world which is so often overlooked or inadequately addressed by parents and carers. Mysogonistic males influencing our boys for clicks, likes and shares without any concern at all for the harm they are causing.

I have always been a staunch supporter of modern parents. The online world is a very difficult one to navigate and it is changing every day. At times, this support has been criticised by others in the world of Cyber Safety who believe most parents are deliberately inattentive or reckless. I simply do not agree with that assumption, as it fails to truly address the difficulties being faced by parents in 2025.

Even in Adolescence, with everything laid out before me, I found myself feeling incredible sympathy for Jamie’s parents. As a Dad, I was shedding tears at how difficult it would be to face the reality of your son being a violent murderer, who is likely to spend most of his life in prison. However, I was also angered at how they failed to step in and act well before Jamie was showing such signs of violence.

In the last few minutes of the series, as Jamie’s parents sob in each other’s arms, blaming themselves for Jamie’s acts, the camera pans into Jamie’s bedroom to reveal a large TV screen, computer and gaming console. As I looked at my wife on the couch next to me, herself in tears, I uttered a series of expletives I will not repeat here! I became angered at their lack of action and how much they clearly dropped the ball in raising their son. Their lack of rules within the home and their failure to engage in the online world of Jamie, ultimately lead to the violent death of a young girl. But then as the series ended, one of the last sentences uttered by Jamie’s father Eddie, flicked my emotional switch straight back to empathy once again;

“He was in his room. We thought he was safe!”

The turmoil of emotion Adolescence evokes has pretty much been my world for the past nineteen years. I encounter parents who do not take appropriate steps to protect their kids online, those who try their best to keep them safe and those who try to do more but can’t. Parents need a hand, but they also need to be told about the harms their children are being exposed to.

I have been personally affected and influenced by the brutal murder of an innocent child at the hands of an online predator. I was recently thrust into the media again as that heartless murderer approaches yet another parole hearing. Next year marks the twentieth anniversary of that crime, one which drove me to move to Technology Crime Investigation Unit as a Police Officer. The design of the internet significantly contributed to his deviance and an innocent child ultimately died as a result. What has changed from then to now?

From that day to this, I have dealt with and continue to deal with the worst the online world has to offer. As such, I am not an outsider simply joining the chorus of comments from all over the world regarding this Netflix series. I am in the middle of it all and I can say without hesitation we are in the middle of an epidemic where our children are being targeted by adults who should know better.

Big Tech have elbowed parents out of the way and are intentionally blocking exits. They have deliberately and recklessly thrown content at our children to get them hooked and keep them engaged. Adolescence is the tip of an iceberg that myself and Cyber Safety educators all around the world are desperately trying to overcome. Our boys are being manipulated how to think by gutless men who simply see girls and women as a picture on a screen. They are being coerced into believing ideology which appears to be the norm when it is not. It seems the norm because of the careless and reckless algorithms pushing content at them by the heartless designers of Big Tech.

Adolescence throws that directly in our faces and we need to see it and hear it.

The viewer is forced to conclude Jamie was stuck in his bedroom, night after night looking at all sorts of content and being pushed down rabbit holes designed to keep him hooked. The online world was saying "Look at this, now look at that!", "Think this and think that!", all the while he was being pushed further and further down the hole without even knowing it.

We should not, must not look at Adolescence as a fictional mini-series. Instead, we must look at it as a real-life documentary! We must consider it a commentary on the under-current of harm our children are being exposed to and the normalisation of abhorrent and harmful behaviour Social Media promotes.

Please have regular conversations with your kids about their online worlds. Get involved in their online environments as young as possible and stay engaged as often as you can. Please get devices out of bedrooms and bathrooms and police that relentlessly. If you can, get your kids involved in extra-curricular activities they enjoy doing and reward that activity as often as you can.

In the meantime, I will continue to try and make those people who are feeding such harms to our children accountable for their heartlessness and greed. However, that will be a drawn out, relentless battle. As such, I aim to work even harder to ensure it is our kids who identify the manipulation tactics Big Tech are using and how little the networks care about them. My education has shifted to shedding true light on how much our kids can change the online world for the better and how excited I am for them to take on that challenge as a generation.

More importantly, as I have done for the past 25 years, I will continue to be a positive mentor to as many young men as I can. They need it now, more than ever.

Enough is enough!