Adolescence arrived on Netflix in March 2025 with almost no marketing and became one of the most talked-about and award-winning shows of the year, sweeping the Emmys. Shot in a single continuous take per episode, it follows 13-year-old Jamie Miller — arrested for the murder of his female classmate — and asks what kind of world created him. Christian parents, educators, and youth workers are asking whether they should watch it.
But the Southport case — in which Axel Rudakubana, born in Cardiff to Rwandan asylum-seeking parents, murdered three young girls (aged 6, 7, and 9) at a Taylor Swift-themed children's dance class in July 2024 — became inextricably linked to the show in public debate. Rudakubana's own father testified to a public inquiry that difficulties assimilating into British society as a migrant family may have affected his son. Prevent, the UK's counter-extremism programme, had been alerted to Rudakubana multiple times but failed to act, with one worker reportedly warning against "racially profiling a black boy with a knife."
The creators chose to make Jamie white. Co-creator Jack Thorne defended this, saying "it is absurd to say that knife crime is only committed by Black boys." This is technically accurate — UK knife crime is not exclusively committed by any one group, and cases involving white perpetrators exist. But the choice erases something real. UK government data shows that in London in 2017, 53% of knife possession suspects were Black despite Black Londoners comprising around 12% of the population — a significant disproportion the show's framing sets aside. And when the real-world knife crimes inspiring the show included the Croydon bus stop murder (Black perpetrator) and Southport (child of Rwandan migrants, with documented integration failure), choosing a white working-class British boy as the protagonist is a specific editorial decision, not a neutral one.
Christians interested in truth should hold both things: knife crime involving white perpetrators is real, and the show's framing suppresses a statistically significant pattern in the cases that inspired it. The show's diagnosis — that the problem is online manosphere content radicalizing boys — is real but partial. The Southport killer also had an Al-Qaeda training manual, ricin precursors, and a father whose own testimony pointed to failed immigrant integration. The show's frame asks "what is the internet doing to British boys?" A fuller frame would also ask what mass immigration without integration infrastructure does to children raised between two worlds.
Proverbs 22:6 instructs parents to train children in the way they should go. You cannot do that if you do not understand what other influences are shaping them. Adolescence makes visible the online radicalization pipeline in ways that are genuinely useful for Christian parents to understand.
It scores Mixed (55/100) rather than higher because its partial framing — blaming manosphere content while omitting the immigration integration dimension present in the real cases it drew from — is an editorial choice that reflects the show's secular liberal worldview. Mature Christians can watch it critically, extract genuine insight about online radicalization, and note what the frame excludes. It is not appropriate for the teenagers it depicts.
Rate any movie, show, song, or channel for spiritual alignment.
Visit GodlyScore.com →