Earlier this month I experienced a mixed reaction to Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne‘s Adolescence (Netflix). My reaction was basically “okay, an absorbing, blistering British social drama about a family dealing with their 13-year-old son being accused of a knifing murder of a teenage girl, an incident that seemingly stems from a virulent culture of incel-shaming and toxic masculinity (i.e., the influence of Andrew Tate) among teenage boys.
And yet I had heard that statistically-speaking, the Andrew Tate white-kid incel/manopshere factor in England wasn’t as much of a pervasive social malignancy as Adolescence had contended. I had heard, in fact, that immigrant kids from broken families were a much greater problem in terms of teenage stabbings.
I dismissed this allegation because I hadn’t seen any stats that backed this up, but more fundamentally I knew that if I were to post reliable stats that supported this view, I would immediately be slandered as a racist scumbag by the HE commentariat.
Yesterday I came upon a London.gov.uk press release from 2.10.22 — 38 months ago. It stated that as far as the city of London was concerned, the following was statistically true at the time: “Despite making up only 13% of London’s total population, black Londoners account for 45% of London’s knife murder victims, 61% of knife murder perpetrators and 53% of knife crime perpetrators.”
Granted, Adolescence was inspired by the 2024 Southport stabbings as well as other 2023 and ’24 teenage stabbings in the U.K. Two, the statement doesn’t offer specific stats about teenaged perpetrators in the British equivalent of junior and senior high schools. And three, it doesn’t speifically argue with an allegation that a certain percentage of teenaged perpetrators are white, possibly Andrew Tate-influenced manosphere incels from normal mom-and-dad families.
We know, of course, why Thorne and Graham’s Netflix miniseries didn’t come within 50 miles of the london.gov.uk statistic in question. I don’t think I need to explain why.
I realize that the usual HE haters are going to say that only a racist at heart would allude to the London.gov statistic, and that the smarter thing would be to simply blow it off and go on my merry way. But Adolesence has stirred a lot of concerned-citizen discussion (“what should parents do about this ghastly problem?”) in recent weeks, and nobody has alluded to the possibility that teenage stabbings might have been caused or provoked by anything other than the angry incel-Andrew Tate factor. Have I missed something?
