Adolescence and the process of writing

Sharing my first draft of what would end up being in The New European

Two weeks ago I wrote the first draft of what would become this for the New European. It’s the first time I’ve really written about Eddie being killed my senior year of high school and was a much more difficult and cathartic piece to write.

I would not have written this if Eleanor Longman-Rood, online editor of the New European, hadn’t pushed me to explore the impact of that specific and very personal act of violence when I was in my own adolescence.

When I submitted the new piece, I wasn’t sure if it was garbled. I was not convinced it was cohesive or was still me just broken hearted and still unable to accept what Eddie’s murder would mean to my life.

And this is why editors are crucial. To push you further, to make you dig deeper and get to the real heart of darkness or light. Editors allow writers to explore and move in different directions that allow actual growth and reflection and much stronger work.

Below is my original piece about Adolescence which stayed much more in my wheelhouse about male violence and my work in women’s (and girl’s) safety.

But where is Katie?

Everyone is talking about Adolescence, at social events, work, schools and in the media and bringing the manosphere and epidemic of male violence against women into focus.

Misogyny and the violence women and girls face being brought into mainstream conversation is brilliant; but there is a real risk of believing that a powerful television show is the solution to years and years of incel culture being normalised. A piece of brilliant and needed story telling by men and focused on men, no matter how brilliant, cannot wipe out the reality of mainstay brainwashing and hate of women for years and years on Reddit, 4Chan, Tumblr and the dark web. Awful and violent men are telling boys that women are the enemy and must retreat to a place of subservience and being a vessel for male desire rather than autonomous. If this is all brand new to you, then you haven’t been paying attention to the increasing power and influence of men who preach that they are persecuted and the power women have stolen from them as rightful kings must be restored to them. This need to demonstrate dominance plays out in every part of society and the gap between boys and girls thinking on feminism and women’s place in society is becoming more and more polarised.

Art cannot be all things to all people. But it also cannot be expected to counter balance deep levels of misinformation and hate speech. It is not going to make all parents understand what is happening in their kids head, school or relationship. We want something to point to to fix the state of the world and to crown a progressive piece of work as a watershed moment. And that is expecting too much of a television show.

I watched the show and was moved and impressed by the craft and that more of this kind of content needs to come from men to speak to boys. I appreciated the effort and need for the program and that we need to speak the same language as boys and reach them much younger. We must provide teachers with materials and training to combat the dangerous and pervasive radicalisation of boys and dehumanisation and sexualisation of young girls.

I can appreciate the aim and impact of the show while also finding parts of it problematic. Art will always mean different things to different people, but in creating a show with incredibly nuanced and layered male characters; the female roles are not written with the same level of care and depth. By not having any really fleshed out and realised female characters, the girls and women are peripheral. Katie’s murder is peripheral. Women in the show are bystanders without agency which again reinforces that Katie was basically an extra rather than a child that would have gone on to have a rich and fulfilled life.

Katie is faceless, free of defining characteristics,and somewhat blamed for her death by questions of her being the bully. We don’t meet her parents. We don’t see the devastation that her death will cause. We only meet one friend of hers who is back in school the day after her best mate is brutally stabbed and just turned into a rageful young Black girl. The question of her making Instagram comments being powerful enough to drive him to murder her stayed with me.

And left me uncomfortable. Because once again, if Katie had kept herself to herself and not been critical of him or just gone to the dance with him, she would still be alive. She could have prevented her own murder if she had been a bit more compliant. If she let him shoot his shot, she would have survived. The messaging when there are mass murders or horrific serial killers or domestic violence killings always blames the woman that is killed or the murderer's mother, headlines often describe how he was scorned or rejected or humiliated at the hands of a woman which gives an excuse and justifies his actions.

The reason women and girls are killed at such an extortionately high rate is that men kill them. A woman is killed by a man every three days in our country. That is our reality.

But we require a reason in order to distance ourselves from horrific acts of misogyny. Or we could end up like the victims and it is unacceptable to know it could happen to us. We need a reason a boy was set off and did the unthinkable; because without that, for men to recognise how much the threat of being sexually assaulted or attacked dictates women’s everyday experience is a hideous realisation.

Pervasive low level of fear is drummed into girls from the age of six or seven. What bad men might do to us given the chance and how it is our job to be vigilant and smart and not get ourselves snatched or kidnapped. Or to allow ourselves to be in a situation where someone might touch us or hurt us.

We then graduate into being sexualised in our school uniforms and a confusing time when we want boys to pay attention to us, but not too much attention. A time when we don’t know what we like or want but are curious and have our own hormones raging and adult grown men are yelling sexualised things at us or approaching us and and making us want to be smaller and to hide our new breasts and be terrified of being a target.

That gives way to the adolescent battle between wanting to be older and sexy and cool and still wanting to play with dolls and just stay a child. To not know what we like or want and how to respect ourselves while not being a prude or being left behind. How to be normal, and normal is receiving and sharing intimate photos, going further sexually than you thought you wanted to but not really knowing how to say yes or no. Or finding your voice and identity in an incredibly complex group of other young adults. We depend on teachers to help raise our kids to be kind and respectful but don’t arm them with the time or resources to dive into disinformation and teach critical thinking.

The calls to show Adolescence in every school and use it as a learning tool raises a number of questions about the RSE curriculum and the support and training we are not supplying to teachers that desperately need it and have been asking for it for years. Teachers regularly complain about combatting misogyny and Andrew Tate’s influence and the misinformation and hate being shovelled into our boys. And I am grateful for Adolescence and anything that gets through to boys and increases awareness and creates discourse on male violence against women, especially from a male point of view.

But I also worry that young women watching it could walk away thinking they do not have the right to reject suitors and that they are required to placate and entertain approaches out of fear that they may end up dead if they say no. If they don’t accept the flowers or advances. If they just want to be left alone and don’t fancy the boy.

How is that no longer allowed? .How is it assumed that the girl owes him the opportunity to have her interest or attention, despite what she actually feels or wants.

Watching the aftermath of the murder at their school didn’t feel as catastrophic as my experience with a violent murder where both the victim and assailants were all teenagers. When I was 15, I had a good friend who was murdered my senior year of high school by a group of young men from a neighbouring suburb. I know schools are run differently and it has been 30 years, but it was a life changing event and was treated as such. We were in shock and treated with incredible kindness and given the support we needed by everyone at school- including other kids. We were given a wide berth of compassion as well as counselling. Everyone was very aware of who knew Eddie (we were from same neighborhood but not same school) and there was empathy, comfort and shock.

Our parents were all involved, and I still remember wanting to go to school and see other people that loved him but having no capacity for calculus or anything else. We were excused from classes and allowed to rage, or cry or be really scared. And there were lots of stories about Eddie. About how cheeky he was, and what a smartarse he was and how much of a flirt he was, How the hell something this awful could happen in OUR neighborhood, on the steps of OUR church. We were as close as you can get to the suburbs and generally, yes there was some fighting over turf occasionally and people thinking they were tough guys; but this kind of stuff happens in gangs and housing estates, not on our baseball fields where we would hide kegs and make out. His murder rocked our world and was national news because he was a good (read White and middle class) kid killed by other good kids in one of the more affluent and safe Philadelphia neighborhoods.

But that was our new reality and that experience has certainly informed my becoming a campaigner and advocate for women’s safety thirty years on. I know what that kind of violence does to a child’s outlook and bravado. I still know Eddie’s phone number all these years later. I still get choked up watching 13 going on 30 as he would have been the male lead in my version.

Where was Katie? Who was Katie? Where is the little girl, in the telling of the story of her life being violently taken in Adolescence? Should there be a sequel showing the devastation and multitude of lives irrevocably damaged because of a boy’s rejection? Or is that a story we know all too well from decades of Criminal Minds and CSI and a million books where women and girls are tortured and killed in the most shocking and horrible ways. Are we just accustomed to families of the girls that boys kill?

I had a discussion with a man who is also 46 at Anthropy, a conference about building a better Britain. The conference was full of people invested in being good citizens and participating in making the world a better place for future generations. He made a point of saying he was not worried for his daughter who is in very late teens because she is tough. And both me and a formidable journalist and editor were both saying that he should be and she should be as that is a woman’s reality. He went on to object to my saying it is worse to be a young woman than a young man right now– his stance was that the crisis of male suicide was equivalent to that of murdered women. And I cannot stop thinking about that false equivalency.

We were both dumbfounded and trying to explain that suicide is a choice and a victim in a rape or murder has that choice removed from them. Taking your own life as opposed to violently exerting power to take someone else’s life and future cannot be equated in my view. Suicide is devastating and I am a big proponent for mental health support at every stage of development whether male or female; but someone thinking they have the right to murder a woman is much more terrifying because women’s reality is if someone wants to hurt them bad enough, they will succeed. And no amount of being tough or self defence classes will prevent a man that believes his desire to hurt or sexually abuse a woman is more important than her right to exist and go unharmed.

This discussion is just one example of the deep rooted consequences of misogyny and the patriarchy. There was no malice or intention, but there is a blissful oblivion that Men don’t have to experience the fear; so they don’t recognise or acknowledge the truth of women’s day to day life. Men and women’s lives and experiences are not treated with the same amount of relevance and women’s experiences are negated. We become peripheral and victims rather than the valued human we failed to protect and prioritise and who deserved better from all of us.

Adolescence is a powerful tool to start difficult conversations and but there is no quick fix to the hate that has permeated boys and men’s ideology. Sadly it will take much more to counterbalance the readily available hateful attitudes, policies and societal that prevent true equality. Adolescence lays bare the danger of staying oblivious to the very clear and present danger to our families and lives.