It usually starts with another headline.

A violent act—jagged, sudden. A teenager, eyes hollowed out by something we can’t name yet. A dead girl, her stillness louder than sirens. The ink’s barely dry before the questions arise—Was it toxic masculinity? Was it another missed sign in early adolescence? Was it the weight of social media platforms tightening like a vice?

Another statistic scratches the tally. Another parent trying to make sense of a shattered child. Another system—school, family, tech companies—gutted on the public table. We call it a youth mental health crisis, but those words don’t carry the weight of the silence behind a locked bedroom door.

The blame lands fast. But notice how it always shifts.

One day, it’s the boy’s rage, testosterone gone rogue, and masculine norms gone wrong—“He should’ve known better.” The next, it’s middle adolescence. A basement, a loner’s cave of unlit corners at home where “Someone should have seen him drift.” Then it’s the phone–“Social media accounts rewired his brain,” as if an algorithm could pull the trigger.

We reach for monsters—masculinity, loneliness, the internet—because naming feels like control. It gives us something to blame while the world slips out from under us.

But what if the monster isn’t the boy? What if the real fear is how easily we lose them—into their own minds, into the culture we made, into the systems we won’t fix?

What if it’s not about placing blame but asking better questions before another kid pulls the trigger?

Last week, Netflix released Adolescence, the drama that cracked open a cultural fault line. It begins with a jolt: a 13-year-old boy, Jamie Miller, stabs his classmate, Katie, in a blur of rage. The police move quickly—less than 24 hours to build a case, and then a SWAT team storms into his childhood home, pointing a submachine gun at a trembling kid soaked in his own fear. His face is blank, feelings frozen, as they pull him into the spotlight.

By the end of the first episode, there’s no mystery. Security footage makes it plain: Jamie did it. It’s not a whodunnit. It’s a whydunnit. And that’s where the real noise starts.

Within days, the internet and social media ignite, not with horror but with a fevered need to diagnose.

The social media platforms light up with certainty. Some blame the social media companies—TikTok, Instagram, all of them. “He was fed violence on a loop,” they say. Others zoom in on the social media accounts he followed: influencers obsessed with status, power, and rejection. A curated reel of isolation.

Then comes the buzzword—toxic masculinity, a phrase slung like a Molotov cocktail: Boys taught to choke on their tears and spit them out as knives. A boy told to man up and harden up until he erupts. Emotional numbness mistaken for strength.

And then, parents are called out for not noticing the spiral. The school, for missing the signs. The platforms, for not protecting the kids who scroll for hours looking for something real.

The long-form think pieces roll in next–“Raising Boys in the Age of Rage,” “Masculinity in the Digital Age,” and “The Quiet Crisis of Adolescent Boys.” Everyone has a theory. Reddit churns. TikTok stitches it. 4chan mocks it.

Everyone’s got a take. No one blames him alone.

Adolescence unspools over four episodes, each a single-take descent into the wreckage.

First comes the arrest—Jamie’s father, Eddie, shouting, “He hasn’t done anything!” Christine frozen mid-breakfast, cornflakes sagging in milk. Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe, sharp and weary, takes the lead.

Episode two shifts to the school—a maze of lockers and fluorescent despair. Bascombe scrolls through Jamie and Katie’s social media accounts, Instagram DMs steeped in taunts and cryptic emojis. His own son, Adam, translates: “She’s calling him an incel, Dad.”

(📣 Incel stands for 'involuntary celibate'—a label adopted by some adolescent boys online who feel rejected by girls and blame them, or society, for their isolation. In dark corners of forums and comment sections, it mutates into toxic masculinity—grievance polished into ideology. Toxic masculinity refers to the pressure on boys to dominate, repress emotion, and equate worth with power.)

Turns out Katie mocked Jamie after he clumsily asked her out—revenge for a topless photo of her that spread on Snapchat. "I thought she’d be weak," Jamie says. "I thought she’d like me then."

Episode three: Jamie, seven months into detention. The softness is gone. Psychologist Briony Ariston brings him hot chocolate. “Do you think girls are attracted to you?” she asks. He squirms, fumbles a lie, mutters that he’s ugly. On anonymous forums, they say 80% of girls want 20% of guys. Trick them, or disappear.

He’s not just a killer—he’s a child suffocating in shame, drowning in a youth mental health crisis we keep labeling as rage.

By episode four, it’s 13 months later. The trial looms. Eddie pounds the walls. Christine whispers, “We made him.” Bascombe, over chips with his son, realizes he barely knows the boy across the table.

They find the knife and guess the motive: rejection, misogyny, social media platforms rewiring emotions, shaping identity through curated comparison and invisible algorithms.

And outside the show, the fear goes viral. Adolescence crashes into Netflix’s top ranks in under a month. BBC interviews parents and real teens side by side. Articles unpack filming locations and dialogue. Conversations spike.

And then come the headlines that tip into policy.

The UK’s Prime Minister calls the series “powerful” and mandates it for secondary schools. Commentators push for the Online Safety Act. Some demand we ban social media altogether. Critics say social media companies must finally act. Headlines blame Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat as if a screen alone taught a boy to bleed.

No one says Jamie was innocent. But no one says he was whole, either. He’s the question no one wants to answer. A warning wrapped in flesh.

But what if we’ve been asking the wrong questions all along?

And what if the story flipped?

Imagine Katie was the one holding the knife. Jamie mocks her online, calls her a slut in emoji code. His friends join in, the way they often do on social media platforms—snide comments dressed as jokes, private DMs laced with public shame. The bile floods in. She snaps. Months of venom, of risky behaviors normalized by the scroll, boil over. She stabs him. And now he’s the one bleeding out in a school stairwell.

Would we say she was pushed too far? Would we blame social media companies for fueling the fire?

Would we call it a crisis—another sign that adolescence is spiraling under the weight of constant surveillance and invisible cruelty?

Would we say this is part of a youth mental health crisis?

Would we finally admit that girls, too, can be shaped—twisted—by a world that thrives on humiliation?

I’m not so sure.

So maybe we look back, trace the outlines of a story we’ve seen before.

The forest in Wisconsin was damp on May 31, 2014. Two children—12 years old, sneakers dragging over pine needles—led a third into the trees.

Anissa Weier’s eyes darted like she was chasing shadows. Morgan Geyser was small, silent. Behind them walked Payton Leutner, same age, same laugh, same sleepover giggles. Until the laughter cracked.

The woods hushed, and then—blade flashing in sunlight—Morgan stabbed her. Nineteen times. The body becomes a message. Legs. Arms. Torso. Blood seeping into the dirt. All of it, they said, for Slender Man, a digital ghost conjured on social media sites, haunting forums like Creepypasta, stretching imagination into obsession.

The headlines came quickly.
“Girls, 12, Stab Friend to Please Slender Man.”

The courtroom followed in 2017. Morgan, diagnosed with schizophrenia. Anissa, with a shared psychotic disorder. A tale of untreated mental health, of fantasy curdling into delusion.

Payton lived. Just barely. Nineteen stab wounds. Nineteen scars.

But the story stayed focused on the act, not the system. Not the pain that grew in silence.

No national call to action. No online safety act. No town hall meetings on girls in distress.

The mental health treatment angle? Tucked into a footnote, whispered behind clinical doors.

We blamed them. Quickly. Fully.

Not their isolation. Not their exposure to warped digital mythologies. Not the failures of schools, families, screens. Just the girls. Baby faces in mugshots. Guilty.

We didn’t ask whether the algorithm preyed on their vulnerabilities. We didn’t wonder what their social media accounts fed them late at night when nobody else was watching.

We didn’t ask how two little girls could be pulled so far from themselves.

No Newsweek cover screaming “Girls in Crisis.”

No TED Talks on misandry.

We called them evil and closed the book.

And maybe that’s the real question.

Why do we ask so differently when the hand on the knife is a girl’s?

To really understand the stakes, you have to sink into the mess of it. Adolescence years aren’t just a chapter—they’re a rupture. A line that splits childhood from whatever’s supposed to come next. It doesn’t unfold. It fractures. Cracks open young people. Leaves them raw, reeling, and searching.

Experts divide it into three rough stages:

You start to see the changes—physical development, even breast development in girls, or their sudden shyness in the mirror. They deal with peer pressure, first crushes, confusing mood swings. It’s also when romantic relationships begin to matter in ways we didn’t expect yet. They might ask questions about gender norms or wonder quietly about sexual orientation—and we may not always know how to answer. But we see it: their curiosity, their hurt, their attempts to figure out who they are in a world that doesn’t always feel safe.

A hormonal whirlwind, amplified by every notification. Their growth spurt throws off their balance. They pull away, test limits, sometimes even experiment with substance abuse or drug use, not because they want to rebel—but because it numbs something. We see them wrestle with low self esteem, trapped in comparisons, buried in social media use that promises connection but often leaves them lonelier. The negative effects are real—one cruel comment, one post gone wrong, and the social consequences ripple through everything.

They’re adults on paper, but still so fragile. Still growing. Their physical changes slow, but the internal shifts keep coming. They want to be seen, to be loved, to be free. They’re on the edge of early adulthood, and every decision feels like it holds significant amounts of weight. As a parent, you realize how little control you have—how much they still crave your guidance, your belief, your quiet reassurance that they’re not too late, too broken, too much.

And yet, through all this, the world rarely gives them the space—or the parental permission—to just be in the mess of becoming. We expect resilience but forget to nurture it. We demand responsibility without giving room to fall apart.

Go back to 2014.

A teenage boy named Conrad Roy was found dead in his truck in a Kmart parking lot. He died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

He had second thoughts and stepped out of the vehicle but returned after receiving a message from his 17-year-old girlfriend, Michelle Carter, through a social media platform. Her message read: “Get back in.”

Michelle Carter was later charged and convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Her messages were seen as encouragement that contributed to his death. The public focused on her actions, calling her manipulative and emotionally abusive.

However, very few questioned the role of the platform.

No one said texting was dangerous.

No one called for iMessage to be banned.

No one demanded that social media companies be held responsible nor warned against the risky behaviors associated with it.

And yet here we are, ten years later. When a fictional teenage boy in Adolescence kills a classmate, the public reaction is different.

TikTok. Instagram. Reddit.

Parents, experts, and media outlets urge lawmakers to take action and even call to ban social media entirely to protect children and young people from its influence.

Michelle Carter's texts were called monstrous—but iMessage got a pass.

Why?

Maybe it’s not about the platform at all.

Maybe it’s about what we need to believe to feel better.

In 2014, a girl was the villain. So we made her responsible, full stop.

In 2025, it’s a fictional boy unraveling. So we look for the accomplices that pushed him to it.

The message is the same. But when the messenger changes, so does our reaction.​

Rewind back 50 years earlier to Newcastle.

The body of a four-year-old boy was found in an abandoned house. Soon after, a three-year-old was discovered dead near a railway. Both children were strangled. Their names faded behind the one who took their lives: Mary Bell, only eleven years of age.

She was small, freckled. Her face looked too young to be capable of the crime.

The media fed off her blank expression in the courtroom. Headlines exploded: “Murderess at Eleven!”

No one considered her mental health, her trauma, or her environment.

They called her evil.

Only later—quietly, almost too late—did the facts trickle out. Mary had been abused. She lived in a home soaked in chaos. She had witnessed risky behaviors far beyond what any child should see. Her actions mimicked what had been done to her.

But by then, society had already made up its mind.

There was no discussion of social consequences, no national call to protect vulnerable girls, no meaningful policy changes to support the mental health of at-risk children. The community called her evil. Not “a child failed by adults.” Not “a girl in crisis.” Just a killer.

The youngest one we’d seen.

She was eleven. And she was blamed like a woman.

In contrast, when a boy commits violence today, we search for answers. We ask what platforms he was on, how social media shaped his thinking, whether there were missed red flags. We examine his decision-making, his environment, his home life. Parents speak out, experts weigh in, and society wonders: what pushed him to this?

But with Mary, no one asked.

And maybe that says more of the world is deciding where the blame belongs.

A few years ago, Brianna Ghey—16, transgender, still in that fragile space between adolescence and early adulthood—walked into Linear Park on February 11, expecting to meet friends.

She didn’t know two teens were waiting: Eddie Ratcliffe and Scarlett Jenkinson, both 15. Eddie, hardened by kickboxing, hid a hunting knife under his clothes. Scarlett brought a note listing exactly where to stab—chest, stomach, throat.

By dusk, Brianna was gone—stabbed 28 times. The plan was chillingly casual. Texts revealed it all: “Girl I wanna kill,” Scarlett had written. “I’m down,” Eddie replied. She lured, he struck.

In court, they stood side by side. The decision making behind the act didn’t earn nuance or psychological inquiry. The sentence was blunt—22 years for her, 20 for him. Equal in punishment. But unequal in analysis.

Online, the headlines read clean: “Teens jailed for trans girl’s murder.” Her mother wept on TV. Public grief swelled. But unlike other cases, no discussions emerged about gender norms, peer pressure, or what pushes kids toward violence at such a young age.

There was no national commentary on what shaped Eddie’s silence, his consent to kill. No deeper questions about Scarlett’s mind or environment. The focus stayed on the act—not the patterns behind it. No one asked what part of their world failed them.

The story stops cold—individual blame. So maybe this is it: when a woman’s in the frame—even with a man beside her, steel in hand—we don’t dig.

Why?​

Moscow, 2018. Summer heat pressed down on a quiet apartment off Altufyevskoe Highway. Inside, three sisters—Krestina, Angelina, and Maria Khachaturyan—stood over their father’s body. One held a knife. Another a hammer. There was blood, and then, there was silence.

They were 19, 18, and 17—right on the edge of early adulthood, but still minors by many legal standards. Each girl had faced years of abuse, yet once the news broke, few paused to understand the risks they had endured.

The headlines don’t wait.

Outlets called them murderers. Social media platforms labeled them monsters. Many didn’t stop to ask what led to the act. After all, they were young women, not helpless children. Old enough to run, old enough to call the police—so the public assumed they should’ve made a different decision.

But then came the documents. Court files. Medical records. Text messages. A full account of terror began to unfold. Mikhail Khachaturyan didn’t just rule their home—he controlled it. He beat them. He raped them. He threatened to kill their mother. He said no one would ever believe them.

Photos emerged of Krestina’s swollen face. Angelina’s bruised arms. Maria’s silence became its own form of testimony. These weren’t girls capable of giving parental permission. They were victims raised in a cage of fear, shaped by trauma no community stepped in to stop.

And slowly—grudgingly—the narrative shifts.

Meduza runs “Abuse drove them to it.” #SaveTheKhachaturyanSisters trends. Protests swell. A petition hits 300,000 signatures.
Not exoneration. Not absolution. More a hesitation. Reconsideration.

Still, support didn’t come easily. People asked: Why didn’t they leave? Why didn’t they ask for help? The burden of proof fell on the victims. They had to document their pain to make it real.

In the end, there was no clear empathy—only debate. When girls kill, we question their choices. When boys do, we look for the system that failed them.

It shouldn’t take a crime scene to convince us that girls suffer too. That trauma carves into them just as deeply. That sometimes the knife isn’t the beginning—it’s the last resort.

This cycle is familiar to parents—a tragedy strikes, and we scramble for a target. In the 1980s, it was Dungeons & Dragons.

A tabletop game played by teens in their bedrooms became the scapegoat for everything from depression to the occult. When Irving Pulling, 16, died by suicide, his mother claimed the game was to blame. Her grief ignited a nationwide moral panic.

Then came Sean Sellers, 17, who killed his parents in 1985 and said a voice from the game told him to do it. Suddenly, D&D wasn't a hobby—it was a gateway to darkness. Schools began banning it. Church groups burned rulebooks. And across America, children who simply wanted to imagine new worlds were seen as dangerous.

Fast forward to 1999, Columbine High School. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—17 and 18—entered their school with guns and homemade bombs. Thirteen were killed. The response? Panic.

The news reels spun wild—CNN zooms on black trench coats, “Goth culture did this!”—fingers jabbing at dark eyeliner and whispered cliques. Marilyn Manson’s name flares next, Rolling Stone quoting cops: “They worshipped him!”—his voice a siren call for massacre, even though the kids barely knew his songs.

Then it’s Doom, that pixelated shooter video game—Newsweek swears they trained on it, mouse clicks turning to trigger pulls.
People blamed everything except the complexity of the boys' inner lives.

We’ve seen it again and again: something awful happens, and we look for the nearest cultural object to absorb our fear.

It’s easier to blame entertainment than to confront the real risks—mental health struggles, anxiety, drug use, isolation. We ignore that there are many differences in how children and teens respond to trauma, and that each situation demands deeper understanding.

Today, the spotlight burns on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, glowing screens cast as the new devils.

In late 2024, Australia became the first country to ban social media for anyone under the age of 16. The legislation imposes steep fines on social media companies—up to $33 million USD—if they fail to restrict access for minors across platforms such as Snapchat, X, and others by 2025.

We in the U.S. followed suit with the proposed Kids Off Social Media Act, aimed at banning social media use for children under 13 and adding parental permission requirements for teens under 17. These measures come amid a wave of reports linking social media use to rising mental health issues and online harassment during the adolescent years.

Lawmakers cite spikes in depression, cyberbullying, and exposure to violent content as primary risks, and government officials have rallied behind Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s 2023 advisory, which labeled platforms a serious threat to youth wellbeing.
But shouldn’t we learn from our past?

Moral panics often look for an obvious villain—but they tend to overlook the nuance.

Yes, social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram can lead to harmful patterns. A teen might lose hours trapped in endless scrolling, their attention dulled and overstimulated by algorithm-fed content. Filters on Instagram can distort body image, making users—especially girls—feel too fat, too plain, not enough. Digital bullying is constant, with insults and taunts arriving at all hours.

But there’s another side—one that’s quieter, and easier to miss. For many young people, especially those feeling isolated by geography, identity, or rejection at school or home, social media platforms provide a vital sense of community. LGBTQ+ teens, for example, may turn to Reddit threads, TikTok videos, or Instagram DMs not for validation, but for survival—a way to feel seen, accepted, and not alone. For them, these platforms are a lifeline.

When governments choose to ban social media for minors—like in Australia, where no age carve-outs were included, or in the U.S. with the Kids Off Social Media Act—those digital lifelines get cut. And not every teen can navigate parental consent laws safely, especially if home is not a safe place to begin with.

So what happens when we ignore that complexity? When our only response to social media use is to legislate it away? We risk repeating the same mistakes—fighting fear with blunt force, instead of understanding the messy truth beneath it.

Let’s not ignore masculinity. It’s in the room—shaping boys, breaking some, hardening others. But even here, the conversation flattens.

We say toxic masculinity and stop there. We talk about aggression, dominance, emotional suppression—as if that’s the whole shape of the thing. As if every boy handed a knife was handed the same script.

But there are many differences in how masculinity is learned, modeled, and absorbed—not just from parents and peers, but from other men they watch, follow, and try to measure up to.

There’s a lot more to it than that.

There are four primary forms:​

But in our public discourse? Only one ever gets airtime.

We hold up toxic masculinity like a mirror shattered across every screen. We say: This is what’s wrong. And boys—watching, scrolling, trying to fit—see only what not to be.

In trying to fix the problem, we oversimplify it.

We spotlight the most harmful version of manhood, then act surprised when boys either run from it or fall into it.

It becomes a trap: Be strong, but not too strong. Be open, but not soft. Be a leader, but don’t dominate. Be different—but only in ways we’ve already approved.

And somewhere in that confusion, the alienation grows. The very isolation we’re trying to solve, we’re also building.

Masculinity matters. But it’s not just the violent kind that needs examining. It’s the expectations. The contradictions. The silence we wrap around boys while demanding they speak.

Not all masculinity is toxic. But talking about only one kind?

That’s a toxicity of its own.

Michelle Carter. Mary Bell. Slender Man. Brianna Ghey. The Khachaturyan sisters.

These are not just stories—they are stress tests for how society handles violence committed by girls.

Each time a girl is involved in a violent act, the first instinct is to look inward. We ask, “What’s wrong with her?” We study her childhood, her behavior, her diary, and her mental health. We analyze her relationships, her social media, and her expression in the mugshot. Did she always have signs of anxiety or depression? Did anyone see it coming?

With girls, the focus is internal. Their actions are presumed to come from something defective or broken within—unless overwhelming evidence proves otherwise.

But when the perpetrator is a boy, we shift our focus outward. We examine the parents, the school, the community, the culture, the screens. We ask what systems failed him. We explore the influences in his life—loneliness, peer rejection, emotional suppression. His mental health is often front and center in the analysis. The intent isn’t to excuse but to understand.

This isn’t just a double standard—it’s a deep, ingrained reflex in how we interpret tragedy.

And it’s not new. When 11-year-old Mary Bell killed two children in 1968, the public didn’t explore her trauma or the abuse she experienced. Despite a background of neglect and documented harm, she was labeled a monster. No one considered what kind of mental health treatment or intervention she might have needed.

When Michelle Carter urged Conrad Roy to take his own life, she was portrayed as manipulative and cold. Her mental health, including her treatment history, barely entered public discussion.

When teens Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier stabbed their friend in service of the fictional Slender Man, we didn’t ask about parental permission to access dangerous material or early intervention. We saw only girls who were “disturbed.”

And when the Khachaturyan sisters killed their abusive father, the headlines weren’t about children pushed past their limits. They were about why the sisters didn’t escape or seek help sooner.

But when boys commit violence, our questions expand. We view them through a lens of potential reform, often acknowledging the gender norms that boxed them in or the societal pressure they couldn’t navigate. They become a case study, not a cautionary tale.

This isn’t just a matter of gender differences—it’s about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the unthinkable. When boys kill, it reinforces what we already fear: that boys are vulnerable and explosive under pressure. But when girls commit violence, it threatens a deeply held belief that women and girls are caregivers, not destroyers.

So we rush to preserve that belief. We label violent girls as outliers, not products of a broken system. We hold them apart from the narrative, so we don’t have to rewrite it.

But boys? We pull them in. We dissect their pain, look for early signs, and frame it as a mental health crisis that must be solved—for them, and by extension, for all of us.

These names—Michelle. Mary. Anissa. Morgan. Brianna. Maria. Adolescence.

They’re not just archived tragedies.

They are mirrors.

And what we see reflected tells us far more about ourselves than it does about them.

Blaming social media companies doesn’t cost us anything.

It’s easy. It’s clean. It’s modern enough to feel insightful, and vague enough to avoid responsibility.

TikTok becomes the villain. Instagram, the accomplice. The algorithm—shadowy, silent—is the true mastermind.

We point to screens because screens can’t point back.

We ban platforms because it’s faster than asking what we’ve failed to build in their place.

We chase terms like "digital hygiene" and "media literacy" while ignoring the rot in the foundation—parenting that’s exhausted, education systems that aren’t equipped, communities that aren’t connected.

Blaming social media doesn’t ask anything of us.

It lets us sidestep the uncomfortable stuff—the culture we've shaped, the expectations we've set, the versions of masculinity and femininity we feed our kids before they even learn to speak in full sentences.

It doesn’t force us to look at how we raise boys to equate softness with shame. Or how we teach girls that rage has no place in their story unless it’s self-inflicted.

It doesn’t require us to examine the loneliness of suburban childhoods, the pressure cookers we call high school, the way shame metastasizes in silence.

It gives us a villain we don’t have to punish. Just unplug.

But maybe it should cost us something. Maybe it should demand nuance.

Because the truth is, the algorithm didn’t invent violence. Instagram didn’t teach these kids how to hate themselves. TikTok didn’t create misogyny, or cruelty, or despair.

We did.

Together—through what we prioritize, what we ignore, what we fund, what we cut, what we laugh at, and what we label as “too political” when it comes up in school board meetings.

We blamed comic books in the 1950s. Dungeons & Dragons in the '80s. Heavy metal in the '90s. Video games after Columbine. Now it's TikTok, and tomorrow it’ll be whatever new thing we haven’t learned how to use yet.

Because naming the real culprit?

That’s uncomfortable.

It would mean seeing the ways we’ve abandoned our kids.

Or overprotected them.

Or smothered them with expectations they were never built to carry.

It would mean saying out loud: We don’t really know how to raise children in this world we’ve made.

And that’s terrifying.

So we blame the phone. We blame the feed. We ban the app.

And the cycle continues.

The headlines keep coming. The takes keep recycling. And the kids keep dying.

Because the monster was never just in the screen.

It was in the mirror. It was in the silence. It was in the stories we chose to tell— and the ones we were too afraid to face.

The monster is us.