The Real Crime in Adolescence (2025): What Happens to Boys Who Aren’t Allowed to Feel
By Chuck LeBlanc
The 2025 British crime drama Adolescence, created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham and directed by Philip Barantini, is both gripping and devastating. Shot entirely in single takes, its cinematic style adds to the urgency and claustrophobia of the story it tells—a 13-year-old boy, Jamie Miller, arrested for the murder of a classmate. But what stayed with me long after the final credits wasn’t the act of violence itself. It was the silence that came before it.
As a psychotherapist who works with men and boys, Adolescence is a mirror to what I see in my clinical work every day: boys being swallowed by a culture that teaches them to bury their pain, their fear, and their tenderness. At the heart of this story is a stark reminder—hegemonic masculinity doesn’t just shape identity. It can fracture it.
Boys Don’t Cry—But They Do Break
Jamie, played with haunting restraint by Owen Cooper, is not a monster. He is a 13-year-old boy caught in a storm of bullying, humiliation, and emotional abandonment. Targeted online and at school, labelled with cruel names, and pushed to the margins of his peer group, Jamie is slowly hollowed out. The violence he commits doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s what happens when every other form of response—asking for help, crying, showing fear—is made impossible.
This is hegemonic masculinity at work.
It tells boys that strength means silence. That fear is weakness. That vulnerability is dangerous. And so, they turn their emotions inward. Or, as we see in Jamie’s case, those emotions eventually explode outward in ways that are hard to comprehend unless we’re willing to trace them back to their origins.
The Emotional Prison of Being a “Real Man”
Hegemonic masculinity isn’t simply about being tough or unemotional—it’s about policing emotion itself. It builds a narrow corridor of acceptable behaviour for boys and men, and anything outside of that corridor—sadness, softness, uncertainty—is punished, either directly through ridicule or indirectly through isolation.
In Adolescence, that punishment is relentless. Jamie’s pain is not seen. His attempts to speak, to reach out, to be understood, are either ignored or met with confusion. Adults don’t know how to respond. His peers treat his difference like a contagion. The system—both educational and judicial—treats him as a problem to be managed, not a person to be heard.
And while the series centres on one boy’s story, the underlying message is broader: there are countless Jamie’s. Some implode. Some lash out. Some simply go numb.
What Therapy Offers (and What Culture Doesn’t)
In therapy, I sit with men who carry these unspoken rules inside them. They’re often high-functioning, thoughtful, successful—and completely disconnected from what they feel. They’ve been praised for being composed, logical, and “not emotional.” But they come to therapy because something has begun to fray. Relationships aren’t working. Anxiety is creeping in. They feel “off,” but can’t name why.
That’s the legacy of hegemonic masculinity. It doesn’t just teach men what to show the world—it teaches them what to hide from themselves.
Therapy offers something culture doesn’t: permission to feel. Permission to grieve what was lost in childhood. Permission to be uncertain. And most importantly, permission to imagine a version of masculinity that isn’t built on emotional suppression.
Final Thoughts: The Violence Beneath the Violence
Adolescence doesn’t glorify its subject matter. It offers no tidy resolutions. Instead, it gives us something more urgent: a question. What happens when we create a world where boys are not allowed to feel? What do we expect to grow in the silence we impose?
The real tragedy of Adolescence isn’t just what Jamie does. It’s what was done to him—slowly, culturally, and invisibly—long before he ever picked up a weapon.
