Is Netflix ‘”Adolescence” based on a true story?

What happens in youth?

The series begins with the police that breaks the door to Jamie Miller’s house. A 13-year-old boy is arrested because he stabbed the death of his classmate Katie. Jamie insists that he did nothing wrong, but when the episode ends, safety material from school shows that he absolutely did.

While the investigators examine school and events before the terrible incident, they discover the exchange of social media between Jamie and Katie. He tried to ask her after a photo was sent from her upper classmate via Snapchat to do this to help her feel better. “I just thought she could be weak,” says Jamie. “I thought when she was so weak, she likes me.”

But she rejects him and sends him messages on Instagram with emojis, in which he is accused of being an “inclusive” or involuntary celibacy, and referred to an online subculture of men who are angry with women because they have no sex with them. Jamie admits to see in Andrew Tates “80-20 thing”, as he calls it, the idea that “80 percent of women are attracted to 20 percent of men”. Jamie’s violence is obvious, but Katie is not completely innocent because her online bullying also feels completely inappropriate.

“This is a show about a child who does the wrong and causes great damage. To understand him, we have to understand the pressure on him,” Graham continued to the BBC.

“Jamie was polluted by ideas that he heard online who make sense for him, who have an attractive logic for him, who answer the questions about his loneliness and isolation and cause him to make some very bad decisions.

Is youth A true story?

While Jamie’s story was told in youth Is not based on a single incident, but from a handful of real reports from boys who are involved in knife crimes. In March 2023, almost 18,500 precautionary measures and convictions were carried out for the possession of a knife, and 17.3 percent of these criminals were between 10 and 17 years House of Commons Library.

“It shocked me. I thought:” What’s going on? What happens in society where a boy stabs a girl? What is the climb here? “And then it happened again and it happened again. Netflix ‘tudum.

“We could have done a drama about gangs and razor crime or about a child whose mother is an alcoholic or whose father is a violent abuse,” he continued. “Instead, we wanted to see this family and think: ‘My God. That could happen to us, and what happens here is the worst nightmare of an ordinary family.”

In fact, a simple Google from “Boy Stabs Girl” provides a terrible number of news results, many of them contain a romantic rejection. In 2024, 15-year-old Holly Newton was repeatedly stabbed in Hexham, England in 2024 by a boy at the time she claimed that she had “persecuted” her, who BBC reported. In 2023, The independent reported that a 17-year-old girl was stabbed in South London after “rejected flowers” when she and her friends made their way to school.

This is a problem that is certainly not isolated in Great Britain. In Oklahoma City in 2018, a 14-year-old boy stabbed his 14-year-old classmate during a school assembly at the Luther High School. The Oklahoman reported later That the boy and the victim were friends, but he wanted a romantic relationship. “She said … she liked him as a friend, no longer and she stayed friends,” said David Randall, chief of police at Luther.

The Jonathan Law High School in Connecticut was a similar tragedy in 2014 when 16-year-old Maren Sanchez stabbed her classmate after her invitation to Junior Prom, the New York Times reported.

The timing of youth It is certainly moving, the rise of the “manosphere” and the radicalization of young men and boys corresponds through numbers such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. “(Das) could happen to everyone and that doesn’t say that someone is able to be Jamie,” said Thorne of the BBC. “It is about parents who have not seen him, a school system that let him down, and the ideas he consumed.”