Adolescence: how the manosphere radicalizes a 13-year-old boy

Adolescence, the British miniseries Netflix premiered in March 2025, makes a formal choice that is also a thesis: each of its four episodes is shot in a single continuous take, with no cuts, no escape. The camera won't let us look away. And what it forces us to look at is Jamie Miller, thirteen years old, the face of a boy, accused of killing a classmate, Katie. The question the series poses is not that of the classic thriller —who did it— but a far more uncomfortable one: where did a thirteen-year-old kid learn to look at a girl like that? The answer the series hints at has a name in the public debate: the manosphere, that constellation of forums, channels and incel communities circulating through the phones of millions of teenagers.

Before we go on, the guiding principle of this house: to explain is not to excuse. Reconstructing how a boy comes to hate does not erase a single gram of the responsibility of whoever decides to do harm; it illuminates it. And another caution just as important: risk is not destiny. Millions of teenagers pass through the same forums, the same schoolyard humiliation and the same loneliness without attacking anyone. The manosphere is a risk factor, not a button that gets pushed. Fiction exaggerates so that we can see a real mechanism; our job here is to name that mechanism without turning it into an alibi. And the mechanism has an old name in criminology: it's called learning.

// The theorySutherland: deviant behavior is learned too

In 1939, Edwin Sutherland formulated an idea that remains one of the most solid in the discipline: crime is not inherited nor does it spring from an inner defect, it is learned, and it is learned just like any other behavior —in interaction with other people, within intimate groups—. His theory of differential association holds that what is transmitted is not just techniques, but something more subtle: definitions. Attitudes, justifications, frames of interpretation. One becomes prone to crime when the «definitions favorable» to breaking the rule outweigh the unfavorable ones. It's not magic: it's exposure, repetition and intensity.

Sutherland was thinking of neighborhood gangs and apprentice thieves who sat beside a master of the trade. The manosphere is exactly that, but delocalized and on an industrial scale. A boy alone, in his room, without a single bad physical companion, can be surrounded twenty hours a week by «masters» who explain to him, with a tutor's patience, that women are a rigged market, that he belongs to a caste of biological losers and that his rage is justified. Decades later, Ronald Akers refined the model toward social learning: what matters is reinforcement (the likes, the status within the forum), the imitation of models and the definitions one internalizes. The screen offers all three at once, doled out by an algorithm that rewards whatever hooks you most.

// The classroom with no teacherthe manosphere as pocket-sized differential association

What makes the manosphere so effective as a school is that it doesn't present itself as a school. There is no indoctrinator with a megaphone; there are memes, jokes, a vocabulary of its own that makes whoever masters it feel part of something. That is the heart of differential association: behavior is learned in intimate groups where one wants to belong. And for a humiliated teenager —Katie, in the fiction, had called Jamie an «incel», a dart that hurts like few others in the schoolyard— the manosphere offers exactly what school denies him: an explanation of his pain that doesn't blame him, and a community that welcomes him with open arms as long as he accepts its grammar.

That grammar almost always includes a repertoire of techniques of neutralization: the narratives that defuse guilt in advance. «Women have already done this to us», «the system is rigged», «I'm the real victim». Sykes and Matza described these moral alibis in the fifties; the manosphere mass-produces them. When a boy repeats them enough, they stop being excuses and become lenses: he no longer sees a classmate, he sees a piece of an unfair market. The researcher Debbie Ging, in theorizing the masculinities of these spaces, describes how resentment is organized into an entire cosmology —alphas, betas, incels— that gives each personal frustration a place on a seemingly scientific map. It's a complete curriculum, with jargon, martyrs and enemies.

Here it's worth building a bridge to two characters KRIMINIS has already dissected, because they teach the same mechanism in different clothes. Derek Vinyard, the neo-Nazi from American History X, is not born hating: someone —a mentor, a group, a badly handled grief— teaches him an ideology that orders his rage and gives him enemies. And Combo, in This Is England, is the recruiter who turns a kid's need to belong into political ammunition. The creed changes —racism then, misogyny now—, but the machinery is identical: a vulnerable young person, a group that takes him in, a narrative that transforms pain into doctrine. The manosphere is the recruiter from This Is England turned into an app, available 24 hours a day and faceless.

// The limit of the theorylearning hatred is not the same as carrying out the crime

And here is the line that no honest reading should cross. Between learning hostile definitions and carrying out a homicide there is an abyss that most never cross. Differential association explains why misogyny spreads and takes root; it does not dictate the passage to the act. Millions of boys absorb that jargon and abandon it as they mature, or contradict it with other, stronger influences. The digital classroom competes with other classrooms: the home, flesh-and-blood friends, a teacher who notices, a coach who listens. When those other schools fail all at once —when the boy is isolated, humiliated and without a single adult to contradict him— the balance of definitions tips. But it tips; it doesn't fall by decree.

That's why Adolescence is so disturbing without needing to show the crime: it puts the focus on the ecosystem, not on the monster. There is no villain with fangs, there is a boy and a breeding ground. Albert Cohen —here it's worth recalling Albert Cohen and his idea of status frustration— would explain Jamie like this: a kid who fails to gain status through the legitimate channels of school finds in an alternative subculture a value system where he can finally win. The manosphere sells him exactly that: a new leaderboard, with rules that turn his failure into moral superiority. Humiliation becomes the engine, and the forum, the map that channels it.

// What to do with thisif it's learned, it can be unlearned

The best news in Sutherland's theory is also its practical promise: if hostility is learned, it can be counteracted with other learning. Prevention does not consist of confiscating the phone and hoping for the best —that only switches off one of the classrooms—. It consists of making sure the other schools of behavior speak louder: present adults who discuss what the boy consumes without ridiculing him, real friendships that offer belonging with no ideological toll, and an emotional education that gives him a vocabulary for his frustration other than the one the forum hands him. The goal is not to censor adolescent rage, which is legitimate, but to contest the narrative that claims it.

The series leaves the viewer with the exact discomfort it was after: the sense that this doesn't happen in some distant underworld, but in the room next door, on the home wifi. Watching Adolescence through a criminological lens doesn't help you sleep better, but see better: to understand that the radicalization of a minor is not a bolt that strikes, but a curriculum that is taken, class by class, while the adults believe he's just playing. And that the useful question is not «what monster did this?», but «who was teaching him, and where were we?».