‘’Smartphones Harm Boys’ Minds, Study Shows”

Every so often, a television drama comes along that has the power to change things. Last year, it was ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, in which the plight of subpostmasters was rendered with such success that it actually hastened in real-world legislation to compensate them.

And now we have Netflix’s Adolescence, which looks at the online radicalisation of young boys by men’s rights activists (MRAs) such as Andrew Tate. Last week, Keir Starmer told the Commons he had been watching the series with his family and that it portrayed an “emerging and growing problem” That needed to tackled . Now MPs are examining ideas to address the issue with greater urgency.

It probably shouldn’t work like this. Policy decisions would ideally not hinge on the quality of an actor’s performance (Adolescence had some spectacular ones, which explains its success), and whether politicians manage to catch the latest Netflix series. It makes us look a little emotionally incontinent, as a country, when the decisions of TV drama commissioners weigh quite so heavily in our politics. But the fickle spotlight of political attention has landed here, for now.

The issue of rising misogyny among young boys, fuelled by online influencers, has long been troubling. If we are approaching a point that action might be taken, that is a good thing. But what should that action be? There are, roughly, two lines of thought.

One is that the problem stems from an unfulfilled need among these young men – a lack of guidance, or self-esteem or of other men on which to model themselves. That was the central contention of Gareth Southgate Dimbleby lecture last week. He talked of an “epidemic of fatherlessness” and the fact that boys are spending less time at youth centres and sports events where they might have met the kinds of aspirational figures Southgate looked up to: coaches, youth workers and teachers. Without this, he said, boys are driven on to the internet “searching for direction”, where they stumble on role models who “do not have their best interests at heart”.