'Female teachers are being abused by boys, find teaching hard': 'Adolescence' creator Jack Thorne on the show’s depiction of real-world issues

Jack Thorne, who co-created Netflix's Adolescence with actor Stephen Graham, was as surprised by the show's instant success as everyone else. The show, which seeks the truth about the motivation behind a 13-year-old boy’s murder of his female classmate, triggered several debates about technology, social media, bullying, and incel culture, among other things.

In a new interview with Deadline, Thorne offered his two cents on some of the topics that figured in discussions since the show's premiere in March. Starting with what he set out to do in the show, Thorne, who also wrote it, said that their aim was to "tell a story of complication rather than simplicity" and that the ambiguity was what made the show more interesting. 

ALSO READ: 'Adolescence' review: Netflix's most impressive series currently is a must-see cautionary tale

"We weren’t trying to make a polemic. But I’d say that it is about knife crime, in that it was about the fact that we were noticing that there were more and more crimes involving knives, cases of boys hurting girls. That increase was the thing that interested us, so, trying to investigate what is going on for young boys right now — that was the starting point of it," said Thorne, adding that the surprising factor was "incel culture."

"As soon as I read a particular statistic — that, supposedly, 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men — I thought, 'If I were 13 and I heard that, I’d believe it. I’d believe that no woman is ever going to find me attractive. I’d believe that I’m not in that group of 20% men. I’d be certain I’m not.' Then, suddenly, Jamie started to make sense, which isn’t to say that Jamie is solely a product of incel culture because — like you say — we don’t ascribe blame to anything. What we do is, we give degrees of blame to all sorts of different places," he elaborated.

ALSO READ: Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ raises questions about children’s mental health in the social media era

In the interview, Thorne also addressed the problem of bullying and kids' attention in school. "I’ve spoken to teachers, and I’ve spoken to teaching unions about this. There’s a problem with attention. Keeping kids involved in class has become very hard. There’s also a problem with female teachers, who are finding it very, very hard to teach. I have only anecdotal evidence for this, but female teachers are saying that they’re not only being verbally abused, they’re also being physically abused by boys. I was also talking to girls who said things like, 'I don’t speak in class, because there’s a group of boys that aren’t very nice, that intimidate me.' That’s happening. That’s why there is a big movement about how we deal with smartphones. Different schools are doing different strategies, and it’s distressing that the government isn’t really helping."

Entertainment