4 hours ago
2
Two and a half years ago, Stephen Graham phoned me up to ask if I was interested in writing a show about knife crime. He wanted to talk about young male violence towards women and he had two stipulations: he wanted to do it in a series of single shots, and he didn’t want to blame the parents.
I enthusiastically got involved and suggested we write together. At first, we didn’t know why Jamie, the perpetrator of the attack, did it. We knew he wasn’t a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive. Then someone I work with, Mariella Johnson, said: “I think you should look into ‘incel’ culture.”
I expected to be confronted by anger and aggression; what I didn’t expect was to quickly grasp the attraction of the so-called “manosphere”. I knew almost immediately that if I was an isolated kid, I would find answers as to why I felt a bit lost. One of the central ideas – that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men – would have made adolescent me sit up and, frankly, nod. The path then becomes: what do you do to upset that equation? How do you manipulate and harm in order to reset a female-dominated world that works against you? If you believe one part of the logic, the other half becomes conducive.
The only episode Stephen left me alone with was episode three. He said to write a two-hander that looked into Jamie’s mind. Writing it, I was shocked at how much of Jamie I had in me. His pain, his anger, contains sides of me I didn’t want to see. He comes from a good background, like me; he’s a bright boy, like I was. The key difference between us? He had the internet to read at night whereas I had Terry Pratchett and Judy Blume.
Jamie is not a simple product of the “manosphere”. He is a product of parents that didn’t see, a school that couldn’t care and a brain that didn’t stop him. Put 3,000 kids in the same situation and they wouldn’t do what he did. Yet spend any time on forums on 4chan or Reddit, spend any time on most social media platforms and you end up, quite quickly, in some dark spaces. Parents can try to regulate this, schools can stop mobile phone access but more needs to be done. There should be government support because the ideas being expressed are dangerous in the wrong hands and young brains aren’t equipped to cope with them.
My son is almost nine. In two years’ time he will be begging me for a smartphone. By that point, 60-70% of his class will have phones. Do I say no and isolate him? I can put controls in, but I’m not digitally sophisticated; my 12-year-old nephew already runs rings around me. I have seen what he could see and I don’t know how to stop him seeing it. I know I’m in the same position as hundreds of thousands of parents worrying about these things.
Josh MacAlister’s protection of children (digital safety and data protection) bill originally proposed banning phones in schools and introducing a digital age of consent that would ban social media use until 16. This was watered down, for reasons I’m unsure of, and by the second reading what was decisive had become discursive. Instead of legislation, the government has committed only to an assessment when the problems of the present are so clear.
If it was my decision, I would be talking of smartphones like cigarettes and issuing an outright ban on all use by under-16s, but if that isn’t possible the digital age of consent is a fine alternative. In Australia, social media companies will be liable for fines of up to £25m if they don’t systematically stop children younger than 16 from holding accounts; in France and Norway there are restrictions up to 15. We need to do something similarly radical here.
What you hope when you make a piece of social realism is to create a conversation. We wanted to make something that people want to watch, of course, but we also wanted to pose a question that got people talking on their sofas, in pubs, in schools, maybe even in parliament. This show is a tragedy. Katie’s loss is the apex of that tragedy, but I hope it’s OK to say that Jamie is a tragedy, too. We will not solve the problem by kicking this issue into the long grass. This requires urgent action. I hope the government is brave enough to reconsider it.
