ADOLESCENCE

You Covered Up Grooming Gangs — Now You Want to Warn Us About Screen Time?

So, like 25 million other curious humans, I tuned into the British mini-series Adolescence.

Anything that gets this many people talking about the harms of social media, in my mind, is a good thing.

But was it a great series?

In my opinion… it wasn’t.

The horrific stabbing of three little girls dancing to Taylor Swift is still raw in many people’s minds.

So is the years-long cover-up of the Pakistani grooming gangs in the UK—one of the most shameful failures in modern British policing and governance. I’ll be tying this case back to Adolescence, but bear with me while I remind us of this real-life horror before we make it back to the fiction that has everyone frantic.

For over a decade, girls—many under the age of 16—were trafficked, raped, and abused by networks of predominantly Pakistani-heritage men in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford. And yet, local councils, law enforcement, and even social services failed to intervene.

Why? Because officials admitted they were afraid of being labeled racist. Internal reports were buried. Whistleblowers were silenced or dismissed. And all the while, the abuse continued.

Some of the horrific facts from the grooming gang scandals.

• The Jay Report (2014) found that at least 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.

• Victims were as young as 11 years old.

• Many were raped, trafficked between towns, doused in petrol, and threatened with being set alight.

• One girl said she had been raped by “multiple men every night” for years.

• Some were branded with initials of gang members to indicate ownership

• Many victims were in care homes or had difficult family backgrounds.

• Girls were often given alcohol, drugs, or fast food in exchange for sex — a form of coercive control.

So I wasn’t watching Adolescence thinking, “Oh no, this might happen! We must monitor our kids and their screen time!”

I was thinking: this has already happened. People are living in the aftermath of extreme male violence. And the perpetrators weren’t awkward, lonely thirteen-year-olds radicalized online.

They were adult men. They were protected by silence. And they were enabled by a government and justice system too afraid to confront the truth.

And even when we do talk about boys committing violence against girls—yes, there have been tragic cases of teenage boys stabbing or attacking girls—those perpetrators were not anonymous kids from peaceful, loving homes. They were boys with deeply troubled backgrounds. Histories of violence. Mental health issues that had gone unaddressed for years. They were failed by the systems around them long before they picked up a weapon.

Here are the cases - do they sound at all like the narrative in Adolescence?

Axel Rudakubana and the Southport Dance Class Stabbings

2024, 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana attacked a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, Merseyside, resulting in the deaths of three young girls and injuries to ten others. Investigations revealed that Rudakubana had a history of violent behavior and interactions with authorities. “He was absolutely obsessed with genocides,” said one senior official. “He could name every genocide in history and how many people were killed – Rwanda, Genghis Khan, Hitler. It’s all he wanted to talk about.”

Rudakubana had a closer connection to genocide than most other British youths: his father, Alphonse, is thought to have fought with the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), an armed force that battled the Hutu-dominated regime in Rwanda and eventually brought an end to the mass ethnic killings of 1994.

AP News+3Wikipedia+3AP News+3Crown Prosecution ServiceAP News

Hassan Sentamu’s Murder of Elianne Andam

In 2023, 15-year-old Elianne Andam was stabbed to death near the Whitgift Centre in Croydon by 17-year-old Hassan Sentamu. Sentamu had arranged to meet his ex-girlfriend to return personal items but armed himself with a knife beforehand. Elianne accompanied her friend to the meeting and was fatally attacked when she intervened. Sentamu had a documented history of mental health issues, including autism, self-harm, and violent outbursts.

These notes were taken from his court hearing,

“And who are you Hasan Sentamu? You are now 18. You had your 17th birthday on 6 September 2023. You have not had the benefit of a settled and nurturing childhood and family life. You moved to England from Uganda when you were aged 5. You went back to Uganda aged 11, for a few months where you said you had been physically abused. On your return you were withdrawn, you harmed yourself and, unprovoked, assaulted other children at school. A referral was made to Croydon Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and they had intermittent contact with you thereafter. In November that year you had to be disarmed when you took a knife to school, produced it in a lesson and said you wanted to kill yourself. For that you received a youth conditional caution aged 12.”

These weren’t average teens lured into darkness by a few hours on Instagram. These were red-flag kids. A stabbing is always a horrific shock, but neither of these storylines is remotely close to what we see in Adolescence.

Let’s write up Tom’s fictional case….

4. Tom and the Murder of Leah (Fictional – Adolescence, 2025)

In the 2025 Netflix drama Adolescence, 13-year-old Tom fatally stabs his schoolmate Leah, a fellow teenager at his local secondary school in suburban England. The attack occurs after a gradual descent into online radicalisation, where Tom is exposed to misogynistic and violent content via social media algorithms.

Tom is depicted as a quiet, intelligent boy from a stable, middle-class two-parent household. There is no known history of violence, trauma, or mental illness. He has no criminal record, no contact with law enforcement, and no behavioral red flags prior to the incident. His only noted changes involve withdrawing socially and spending excessive time online.

The motive behind the attack is loosely tied to Tom’s growing belief in incel ideology and resentment toward girls, amplified through influencer culture and extremist online echo chambers. It is important to note that self identifying incels usually fall into the age bracket of 18-35…not a 13-year-old.

When you put them close together like this Adolescence doesn’t seem so true to life, so gritty, so real.

There are two other recent cases of 17-year-old boys from seemingly ‘normal’ backgrounds, but in these cases, they were in relationships with their victims and had shown signs of coercive control leading up to the horrific murders. Little information was released about their family situation or mental history but is clear that these are young men, not boys, and they are young men who have not learned how to handle romantic relationships…so maybe this should be something we, as a community, focus on.

There was no suggestion that they had been radicalised online.

And here’s where it gets even more uncomfortable: the UK government, the very institutions that covered up the grooming gang scandals for years, is now praising Adolescence. Prime Minister Keir Starmer endorsed the campaign for the series to be shown in schools, aiming to combat the rise in toxic masculinity and violence among young men.

The same state that failed thousands of real girls now wants to lecture parents on hypothetical dangers?

The irony is thick.

I don’t say that to dismiss the real issues of online grooming, coercion, or radicalization. Adolescence does a solid job of showing how the algorithmic chaos of social media can slip into a young person’s mind like a snake.

I applaud that.

We absolutely need to talk more about how the digital world is shaping our children’s identities, their sense of self, their understanding of violence, sex, and power.

But what about this glaring fact that boys who experienced two or more caregivers before the age of 10 are found to be twice as likely to be convicted of a violent crime?

Youth Club Closures: The closure of youth clubs has been associated with a 14-15% increase in the proportion of youth offending and a 15-16% rise in the number of crimes committed per youth. This suggests that access to supportive community resources plays a role in preventing youth crime.

Parental Criminal Convictions: A parental criminal conviction has been identified as a strong predictor of a child's future offending. Approximately 63% of individuals with a convicted father were themselves convicted by the age of 32, compared to about 30% without a convicted father.

And let’s talk about these toxic social media influencers. Andrew Tate, the most horrific toxic male of them all, with the biggest platform, just like the grooming gang perpetrators, gets his macho mentality from extreme Islamic ideology. Not a single mention of this. It’s not the toxic masculinity of the average dad who likes his son to do well at football, like we see in Adolescence that is leading young men to murder.

And the Leftist feminist ideals in Adolescence were just too much for me. I mean, when Tom’s sister is crying over the stress of their year from hell, her mother strokes her hair and asks if her boyfriend is looking after her. The daughter then goes into a feminist rant that she doesn’t need looking after and her mother shouldn’t be asking such outdated questions. This teenage girl has had the worst year of her life but apparently, even then it’s not okay to lean on your boyfriend. Sure.

We can’t fix this incredibly complex problem of male violence by throwing dramatic media campaigns at it and blaming solely social media and middle-of-the-road parenting. We have to take responsibility and we have to admit that institutions have consistently looked the other way until it was politically convenient not to.

I’m writing this piece because I, like many others, am sick of violence against women. I’m eager to get to the bottom of this, but to get to the bottom of this, we must be willing to look the truth directly in its evil eye and call a spade a spade.

I want to make it clear to the British government that you don’t get to cover up real abuse and then endorse fiction about your moral panic.

Not without people noticing.

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1. Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council. Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (1997–2013). https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent-inquiry-cse-in-rotherham-1997-2013

2. BBC News. “Rotherham child abuse: At least 1,400 children exploited, report finds.” August 26, 2014. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-28939089

3. The Guardian. “Rotherham child abuse scandal: Police ‘feared being labelled racist’.” August 26, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/26/rotherham-child-abuse-ignored-racism

4. The Independent. “Rotherham abuse victims were seen by police as ‘child prostitutes’.” April 9, 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/rotherham-abuse-police-child-victims-prostitutes-a8868296.html

5. BBC News. “Grooming gangs: Where were the abuse scandals?” May 15, 2018. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44074572

6. The Guardian. “Child sexual exploitation scandals: a timeline.” March 13, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/13/child-sexual-exploitation-scandals-timeline

7. BBC News. “Rotherham abuse: Fewer than 50 convictions despite 1,400 victims.” August 31, 2018. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-45367939