Britain’s War on White Boys

New Netflix drama Adolescence has incited a moral panic in Britain. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called it “a documentary,” and pledged to screen it for free in schools across the country. Its creators were invited to Downing Street. MPs cited the series in Parliament as a casus belli for banning social media for children (good) and granting regulator Ofcom further powers to censor online speech (bad). The police have told parents to report their sons to counter-extremism programme Prevent if they are “watching misogynist videos online”.

If you were just reading the headlines, you would think a generation of sexless white schoolboys have been radicalised into stabbing female classmates en masse after watching a few Andrew Tate videos. This is simply not the case — but the state continues to pour copious resources into counter-extremism programmes targeting “Incels,” “toxic masculinity,” and innocent boys. As the Prevent training and classroom resources provided to me and contained in this article show, the British state has waged a long psychological war on white boys. Adolescence is just their latest emotive propaganda effort to justify it.

The most insidious part about the Adolescence moral panic is the lie it perpetuates: that the reclusive sons of happily-married white working-class parents can be converted into misogynistic murderers, without any prior warning signs, by watching Manosphere content online. The murder that inspired the series disproves that premise. Actor Stephen Graham cited the murder of 15-year-old Elianne Andam in Croydon in 2023 as the reason for creating the show. Hassan Sentamu was given a life sentence for stabbing Andam to death outside a shopping centre, after being dumped by one of Andam’s friends. Sentamu was sent to a Ugandan boarding school where he was beaten, and then placed in foster care. 24% of British adults in prison have been in care. Sentamu then threatened to cut his foster-mother’s cat’s tail off, and was given a police caution aged 12 for bringing a knife to school. So, not quite “Jamie,” the quiet working-class white boy with a loving, married mother and father.

Sentamu was raised by a single-mother — as are 46% of children in the UK by age 14. Broken down by ethnicity: 57% of black Caribbean and 44% of black African families are single-parent (mother), compared to only 22% of white British families. 76% of children in custody report having an absent father. These same fatherless ethnic-minority boys are the most likely to hold a favourable opinion of Andrew Tate: polling by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found black respondents reported a 41% positive view of Tate, “Asians” 31%, whereas whites only 15%. Black boys are almost three times as likely as white boys to idolise Andrew Tate; and comprise  61% of knife murder perpetrators, 53% of knife crime perpetrators, and 73% of the Metropolitan Police’s gang matrix suspects. There is an undeniable pattern in the profile of these offenders. Pretending there isn’t prevents the problem from being solved, and subjects innocent boys to derision by the state, culture, and their social peers.

However, the purpose of Adolescence is not to solve a problem; but to serve as a pretext for the state to censor social media, to stop the spread of “Red Pill” content. Curiously, the state wasn’t so quick to suggest a smartphone ban or social media controls when adolescent girls were desperate to amputate their breasts and sterilise themselves with puberty blockers after viewing transgender content on Tumblr and TikTok. Nor did the Home Office take action when aware that people smugglers were advertising their services to illegal migrants using videos of British women, taken without their consent, drunk and scantily-clad, on Instagram. The state remains indifferent to the radicalisation of young women by runaway Woke progressivism, because it advances the regime’s revolutionary goals. This censorship effort is driven by ideology, not child safeguarding.

The popularity of the series is not organic either. The charity promoting Adolescence, Tender, has received £3.9 million in government grants since 2020 — and was co-founded by Keir Starmer’s ex-girlfriend, Phillipa Kaufmann. The charity were invited to Downing Street on the 1st of April, and have partnered with Netflix to make Adolescence free to stream in every UK secondary school. Other materials circulated in schools by Tender include the “Pyramid of Sexual Violence”: which states that “Attitudes and Beliefs” including “Bragging”, “Strict gender roles”, and saying “Boys will be Boys” leads ineluctably to “Gang rape” and genocide.

Tender are one of many third-party providers which schools have consulted since Relationships Education and Health Education (RSHE) lessons were made compulsory in all primary and secondary schools, in 2020. Research by the Family Education Trust in 2024 found these providers’ lesson materials view boys and masculinity through an exclusively intersectional feminist lens. 30% of schools teach children about “toxic masculinity”; and 5% that “men and boys possess traits that are inherently toxic and negative for society.” Their report included another version of the pyramid: listing “Traditional gendered roles within the family” and stereotypes that men should be stoic and the financial breadwinners for their families as leading to rape.

If not taught directly to children, outside providers present these ideas to school safeguarding staff in Prevent training. One such organisation is Exit Hate UK: which receives funding from the National Lottery, and the Mayor of London — just like Tender UK. In materials provided by a safeguarding officer, Exit Hate UK presents social media platforms like X and video streaming platforms like Rumble as vectors for fringe far right radicalisation.

Exit Hate UK presents the “Tradwife trend” — social media content depicting women who give up work, raise their children, and bake bread — as a recruitment tool by “the Far Right”. According to the course provider, women are “expected to be moderately dressed[,] get married in your 20’s[,] and have 4 children. Priority is Marriage – race – country.” They are “Not allowed TVs as it is believed to be controlled by the Government and Jews.” Traditional gender roles are demonised as leading to misogyny, racism, and fascism — just as in the PSHE lesson materials.

The course provider also dismissed the Pakistani rape gang scandal as misrepresented by the “Far Right” — using the total number of child sexual offences by the ethnicity of the offender, rather than per capita, to argue that child sexual exploitation is worse among whites. Associating concerns about child sexual exploitation by gangs of Pakistani men with racism and far right narratives could lead to child safeguarding officers missing warning signs for children who have been victimised by these very real predators.

These charities receive taxpayer funding to shape the curriculum, and safeguarding procedures to help young boys deal with their feelings and frustrations. They depict masculinity as “toxic”, traditional gender roles an ineluctable cause of rape and spousal abuse, and freedom of expression online as a pipeline to far right radicalisation. This is no doubt going to have a detrimental effect on a boy’s self-esteem and mental wellbeing; and should be in violation of sections 406 and 407 of the Education Act 1996, which forbids schools from promoting partisan political views to pupils. Despite this, through the media circus around Adolescence, these beliefs are being amplified into every classroom by the Prime Minister himself.

Another charity promoting Adolescence is communist organisation HOPE Not Hate. Adolescence’s Stephen Graham played HOPE Not Hate researcher Matthew Collins in ITV’s 2022 drama “The Walk-In”. Rosie Cooper, the MP targeted by the thwarted plot depicted in the series, called it “stupid, stupid, stupid,” and accused ITV of using her as a “marketing tool” for HOPE Not Hate. Collins, a former member of the National Front, is a member of the Communist Party, and praised Stalin’s Red Army at a HOPE Not Hate event in 2013. Collins and HOPE Not Hate are not credible arbiters of what is and isn’t extremist opinion; and Graham’s involvement with them makes the motives of Adolescence and its subsequent moral panic suspicious.

As I covered for Courage Media, former government Counter-Extremism Commissioner, Dame Sara Khan also partnered with HOPE Not Hate last December, to produce a report demanding the Home Office and Department for Education target “under 18s who are vulnerable to extremist activity that falls below the terrorism threshold.” Khan made these requests with Andrew Tate in mind: disdainful of the 45% of males aged 16-24 polled who hold a positive opinion of Tate. While at the Home Office, Khan and her sister oversaw a recalcitrance by Prevent staff to monitor Islamist extremism. Islamists are responsible for 94% of all deaths and 88% of injuries caused by terrorism since 1999, and comprise 80% of Counter-Terror Police and 75% of MI5’s open caseload, and 63% of terrorists in custody. However, of the 6,922 referrals made to Prevent in 2023 – 2024, 1,314 were for rightwing extremism, and only 913 for Islamism. Islamist referrals remain 75% lower than their highest (3,706) in 2016 – 2017, despite remaining the most lethal terror threat. Tellingly, only 54 (1%) referrals were for “Incel” extremism. Leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch is right: Islamic terror is much more important than the moral panic about Incels generated by Adolescence.

Why have Prevent reduced their focus on Islamic terror? As previously discussed, a Muslim activist network has taken root in the Home Office, which regards any focus on Islam as a contributor to terrorism as racist. However, HOPE Not Hate were also paid grants of £50,000 and £141,380 in 2019 – 2020 to “brief multiple departments… on emerging trends in UK hate”. Their input, obsessing about an ill-defined “Far Right” is partly responsible for Prevent’s failures to detect and intervene in lethal instances of Islamist terror.

One such failure was Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana. A government review concluded that Prevent, under Stewart’s supervision, “prematurely” dismissed the threat posed by Rudakubana on the three occasions that he was referred between December 2019 – April 2021. While his motivation remains opaque, Rudakubana developed a fixation on terrorism: including the 2017 London Bridge and Manchester Arena attacks, and ISIS car bombs. Prevent officers also misspelled Rudakubana’s surname on his second and third referrals, meaning officers were unable to see his previous interactions with the service on the system. Comparisons in the review were made to Sir David Amess’ murderer Abi Harbi Ali: who was referred to Prevent and met with officers at a McDonalds in Croydon on 6 November 2014, before having his case dropped with little follow up on 5th June 2015. Amess’ daughter, Katie has urged the government since 2021 to investigate why officers failed to intervene, to no avail.

Disgraced head of Prevent, Michael Stewart is now leaving the role; but the remaining Prevent staff are equally culpable in the procedural failures and ideological capture which allowed multiple terrorists to escape interventions. Under Stewart, Prevent published a report following the subsequent protests and riots, which dismissed instances of two-tier policing and the Pakistani rape gangs as a “grievance narrative” exploited by “right wing extremists”. Until the entire department is dismantled and rebuilt, Stewart remains a patsy to preserve a rotten institutional culture. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, Khan, HOPE Not Hate, and Prevent seem far more focused on Adolescence and Andrew Tate than on Islamism or violent crime committed by young black boys against victims of all kinds.

The inconvenient truth is that the sort of murders depicted in Adolescence are disproportionately committed by fatherless black boys; and the majority of extremists radicalised online are not the nebulous “Far Right”, but British-born Muslims. But the state — which has adopted every Woke narrative about institutional racism, systemic inequalities, and human beings having a “blank slate” nature — will not admit this. Rather than addressing the problem, Prevent, politicians, and popular culture continue to scapegoat white boys. They are unsympathetic to the fact that white working-class boys, like the fictional Jamie, are second-to-last in educational attainment, the primary targets of “sexploitation” scams and predation by the online porn industry, and discriminated against by DEI hiring practices. The education system and broader media has treated them with derision, as inheritors of white patriarchal privilege, for over a decade. Adolescence is the culmination of this legal and cultural war of attrition against white boys.

Politicians should stop setting their priorities through works of fiction, and obsessing about second-order issues like online harms. We have enough uncomfortable and costly problems without making white boys into bogeymen for the binge-watching elite.