Losing Katie: How ‘Adolescence’ Erases the Victim While Examining the Incel Mind

As a mother of an eight-year-old, prepubescent daughter watching Adolescence was not easy. This Netflix 4 hour long, limited series has been praised for its impeccable acting, realistic shooting technique, compelling casting but most importantly bringing out on the table what we all have been brushing under the carpet: misogyny and dangerous undercurrents of incel culture. I am not ashamed to confess that it took me some google searches to comprehend what was being hurled at us revealing how disconnected we are as ‘parent community’ with our kids.  A new language of abbreviations enjoined with emojis is being born under the confluence of TikTok, insta and snapchat, to manifest this unique digital living experience. And if you are a millennial parent, it’s a struggle to decipher this new codex. It won’t be far-fetched to say that we are cohabiting in parallel universe, dark -algorithm driven, hypermasculine online world and the harsh realities of the real world with its visceral violent intersecting points.

Adolescence is about a young 13 years old boy, Jamie who is picked up from the Police from his room allegedly accused of killing his classmate, Katie. The entire series then zooms into Jamie, his apparent obvious innocence and childlike vulnerability so much so that as a viewer you hoped just like his father played by Stephen Graham that ‘he didn’t do it’. While Jamie’s guilt becomes abundantly clear in the first episode through the CCTV footage, he continues to profess his innocence deceiving his parents and the audience. It’s not a murder mystery and there aren’t any twist and turns that would hook you and make you fall off the edge, what’s indeed gripping, is the pure absence of such adrenaline that cautiously crawls into the mind of an adolescent. A world locked from inside.

And what’s in there is too dark and gory sitting on the early ruins of childhood. Jamie is conscious about his apparent vulnerability as a child which he skillfully uses to mask his violent temper and misogyny. He tactfully oscillates between vulnerability and violence. Episode three is perhaps the most chilling one where Jamie ‘s encounter with psychologist leads to his inadvertent confession with a violent outburst as his persona wears down. His desperate attempt to seek validation ends with intimidating the psychologist. Katie became a victim of the same rage that psychologist witnessed. Both women, one insulted him and the other got the truth of him.

Incel Culture: Eco Chamber of Hate

One does question, how much hatred does it take for a 13-year-old boy to plan and commit a murder?

The answer lies in Episode 3 again that delves deep into the ‘incel culture’, an insidious online world of Manosphere that promotes hyper masculinity and anti-feminist ideology. Jamie describes himself as ‘ugly’, as an adolescent he is socially awkward struggling with feelings of isolation and rejection. He is labelled as ‘incel’ by Katie on insta which is stamped for approval by many through floating ‘pink hearts’. Incel stands for ‘involuntary celibate’, in other words those men who are unable to attract women sexually are identified as incels. This public humiliation and cyberbullying act as a catalyst pushing Jamie towards online communities that validate his grievance and propagate misogyny. The most dangerous and distorted belief of the incel culture is the 80-20 rule according to which 80 percent of women are attracted to only 20 percent of men who are the alpha male or ’chads’. Incels believe that these ‘chads’ unfairly monopolize female attention while ‘beta males’ like Jamie face perpetual rejection and thus are right in avenging the denial of their male entitlement of sexual gratification through violence. This misogynist worldview frames women as inherently hypergamous and materialistic, reinforcing their beliefs that incels are justifies in avenging their perceived deprivation through violence.

The incel culture works like any other online echo chamber transforming the gradual indoctrination into a firm belief system that distorts reality and morality. Elliot Rodger who was responsible for Isla Vista mass shooting back in 2014 left behind 141-page incel manifesto expressing his deep resentment and anger against women and violence as his revenge on the society. Eliot Rodger created ‘cultural material’, a template that converted loneliness and unhappiness into a strong and ideological structured sense of victimhood which eventually motivated extreme violence and destructive revenge against the ‘imagined’ perpetrators. Promoted and advocated by influencers like Andrew Tate through short aggressive clips, this has led to taking a ‘red pill’ , again an online term used to describe a gradual awakening to the truth of traditional masculinity that glorifies male control, dominance, aggression, violence and emotional detachment to succeed in relationship. It further dehumanizes women as objects and gold diggers who need to be controlled and enslaved. The red pill spaces online provide an easy scapegoat, instead of accepting personal shortcoming or behavioral problems, red pill reframes failure as an external source of oppression i.e., women and fueling a collective sentiment of victimhood and entitlement to revenge, personified by Jamie.

Silencing Katie

Jamie remains the protagonist who commands the narrative and questions about masculinity, toxicity, incel culture, likes and emojis circle around him and his ‘understanding’ of the world. Katie is conspicuous by her absence from the series. She appears in fragments, sometimes as a name, photograph, through her social media accounts, posts and fleeting comment. The intentional invisibilization of Katie favours to imagine adolescence as a complicated process of growing up peculiar to boys. The worst girls can do to boys is ‘laugh’ at them while the worst boys can do to girls is ‘kill’ them. Despite her palpable absence, Katie’s story is just as crucial. She was perhaps just as old as Jamie, navigating the same digital landscape yet with vastly different consequences. Her mistake, if at all was calling out Jamie, an incel on insta, a post that received validation through likes and emojis. Why did Katie do this? Was she mocking Jamie? The series never lets us into her thoughts rather shows us how the online world decide for her, a teenage comment turns into a death sentence.

Jamie’s account of Katie is a neat package of misogyny and toxic masculinity, he asked her out not because he liked her but precisely because ‘he did not like her,’ in other words she was not pretty or even ‘his type’, ‘was flat’ and hence ‘attainable’. Katie’s rejection of Jamie was thus an invitation to murder, justified in Jamie’s Manosphere as an offence that warranted punishment. While Jamie is humanized, his motives probed, assessed, there is pity, sympathy, anger and feeling of collective failure for Jamie, Katie remains a ghost. No memory of her passes through the episodes because that would have instantly made Jamie look like a hard hearted and remorseless criminal. It’s precisely at the objectification and erasure of Katie, that an apparent case for Jamie’s vulnerability is maintained, at least till the third episode.  Also, unlike Jamie, we don’t see Katie’s room or her belongings, neither do we hear her parents reminiscing about her with an exception of her friend Jade who is perhaps the only one who speaks the brutal truth with the right dose of rage, shock and pain. The narrative prioritizes the experience of Jamie (perpetrators) to an extent that Katie (victim) remains as dead in the beginning as in the end. Katie is reduced to a footnote in the story of Jamie, as a choir in the end. The show’s refusal to give Katie a voice of her own, not even a ‘scream’ in the moments of her death serves a very disturbing function of sustaining the illusion of Jamie’s almost Machiavellian innocence. Had Katie fully realized as a person with her fears and insecurities and other complexities of adolescence, Jamie would become exactly what he is: a cold-blooded murderer, or would he?

Need for Critical Conversations

Adolescence is not just a television series—it is a wake-up call. It exposes how digital subcultures radicalize boys, weaponize their insecurities, and push them toward misogyny and violence. It also shows that as parents we are failing to engage with the online spaces our children inhabit making our children’s young impressionable minds an easy prey to radicalisation. And, perhaps most chillingly, it highlights how media narratives continue to prioritize male experiences, often at the cost of erasing female victims.

Katie should have had a voice. Her absence is not just a narrative choice, it is a reflection of how, in real life too, victims of male violence are often reduced to mere names, headlines, and statistics. As a mother, this series left me shaken but determined. It is not enough to shield my daughter from the dangers of incel culture, I must also equip her to challenge it. And for parents of boys, they must start at home and very early to break the cycle before it begins, to dismantle the digital pipelines that are raising our children into monsters and to ensure that our sons do not become the next Jamie.

Amina Hussain is an Assistant Professor at Sarojini Naidu Centre for Women’s Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She writes on gender issues.