Teenagers and Adolescence

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    Tate-Pilled Boys Are a Problem for Schools

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    I watched the four hourlong episodes of the Netflix series “Adolescence” in one extended, horrifying gulp. The story follows an angel-faced 13-year-old British boy named Jamie who is accused of murdering his classmate, Katie, and lays out the effect on his family and peers. The show is fiction, though the creators say they were partly inspired by the shocking reality of violently misogynistic young men. “What’s happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What’s the inciting incident here?” Stephen Graham, who is a writer of the series and also stars in it as Jamie’s bereft father, recalled thinking after one particular assault. “And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again.”You know by the end of the first episode that Jamie is guilty; the police have video of Jamie stabbing Katie. So the central question becomes why did he do it, and the explanation rolls out over the next three episodes. His family is loving, if imperfect, like most families. Jamie’s father, a plumber, is disappointed in him for not being an athlete and doesn’t quite know how to relate to his sensitive, artistic son. Jamie is bullied in school and filled with self-loathing, and he turns to Andrew Tate and other purveyors of sexist online content to make himself feel big.In the third episode, a pretty, young psychologist, Briony, draws out the “inciting incident” for the murder. Katie sent a photo of herself topless to a classmate, who then circulated it without her consent — something all too common in the real world. Jamie subsequently asks her out, thinking she might be amenable because “she might be weak,” since “everyone was calling her slag, you know, or flat or whatever.”Katie turns him down, saying she’s not that desperate, and mocks him as an incel on Instagram. His entitlement and shame drive him to kill her. During the episode, Jamie mocks and menaces Briony, at one point standing over her, cursing at her and roaring in her face — it seems that every time she gets him to show his soft, vulnerable side, he turns on her, using undermining “negging” techniques that were often promoted in the online manosphere as far back as 20 years ago, before it was even called that, back when its levels of misogyny were quaint by today’s standards.Jamie’s treatment of Briony reflects an unfortunate reality: Female teachers in Britain have sounded the alarm about incel culture — in 2022, The Guardian reported that 70 percent said they have faced misogyny in schools, evidence that many red-pilled boys feel the need to reassert the power dynamic of male supremacy even to adult women. In 2024, Cosmopolitan U.K. reported on “school in the era of Andrew Tate.”Stephanie Wescott, a lecturer at the school of education, culture and society at Australia’s Monash University, was a primary-school teacher before she went into academia, and she told me she experienced “sexism, sexual harassment and misogyny just as a daily experience in the classroom,” from teenage boys. She started reading news reports of teachers experiencing “a wave of misogyny” after Tate became popular in Britain and she wanted to see if Australian teachers were dealing with the same problems.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Teenagers Say Girls Are Equal to Boys in School, or Are Ahead

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      Reflecting a generational change, two Pew surveys show boys tend to feel discouraged in the classroom, and are less likely than girls to pursue college.In the 1980s and 1990s, boys still dominated American classrooms. They outscored girls in math and science, they raised their hands more often and they got more attention from teachers, data showed.That’s not the reality for today’s students. More than half of teenagers say that boys and girls are now mostly equal in school. And significant shares say that girls have advantages over boys — that they get better grades, have more leadership roles and speak up more in class, according to a Pew Research Center survey of teens nationwide published Thursday.Boys are more likely to be disruptive, get into fights or have problems with drugs or alcohol, the teenagers said. And strikingly, boys said they’re much less likely to be college-bound: 46 percent of boys said they planned to attend a four-year college, compared with 60 percent of girls.“What happens to a society when there’s such disparity between men and women in educational outcomes?” a researcher said. Kendrick Brinson for The New York TimesTeenagers aren’t often surveyed by high-quality pollsters. Their responses in the Pew survey reflect other data on educational outcomes. Boys today have more challenges than girls in school as early as kindergarten. Girls have narrowed gaps with boys in math (though they have widened since pandemic school closures), and girls outperform boys in reading. Boys graduate from high school and attend college at lower rates.Boys’ struggles in school could have long-term consequences, researchers say. The share of men working has declined. Nearly half of Republican men say American society has negative views of men, beginning with their experiences as boys in school. Young men’s feelings of disconnection played a role in the election — this group swung toward President Trump, perhaps in part because he promised to restore their status in American society.

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      How Sweden Could End Its Epidemic of Gang Violence

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      We used to believe in Sweden that the rights and well-being of children should always come first. But over the past two decades, a surge in gang violence has shaken that commitment. In 2023, 363 shootings took the lives of 53 people; this year, over 100 bombings stemming from gang violence had already been recorded by November. Our country now has one of the highest per capita rates of gun violence in the European Union. One key factor in the phenomenon: Gangs are grooming and recruiting children as young as 11, the police say, as contract killers.Swedes aged 15 to 17 who commit crimes are usually placed in government-run residential homes instead of prison.Such youth homes have come under scrutiny for mixing children who need housing because of family problems alongside those who have committed serious crimes.A basic tenet of the country’s juvenile justice system was that long prison sentences hurt both children and our society. Until recently, young people who committed crimes were likely to be placed in residential homes, where they received treatment for addiction and mental health disorders. Imprisonment was extremely rare. Offenders ages 18 to 21 often received sentence reductions, known as “youth rebates,” and were also placed in treatment homes.As crime among young people rises, though, the government has moved to toughen sentences for these offenders and eliminate most youth rebates. As a result, two teenage boys were ordered to serve 10 and 12 years in prison in August — the longest sentence Sweden has given to such young people in modern history — after being convicted in connection with a shooting spree that left three dead and injured two others, including a 2-year-old child.Essa Kah Sallah was about 11 years old when he began committing minor crimes. He later founded the Chosen Ones, one of Sweden’s most dangerous gangs. “The gang gives you an illusion of togetherness,” Mr. Sallah said. “But there is no brotherhood, no loyalty — just pointless violence and death.” He left the Chosen Ones four years ago and now works for a program that helps others leave gangs.Politicians have laid the blame for the gang violence on Sweden’s generous refugee policies, and the country has moved to tighten its borders. Some on the far right argue that aggressive repatriation of foreigners, particularly Muslims, is the only solution. And in the aftermath of a deadly shooting this past spring, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson denounced “a kind of inhumane, an animalistic attitude” among the group of youths said to have committed the crime.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Which States Have Passed Bans on Treatment for Transgender Minors?

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      The challenge to a Tennessee law before the Supreme Court this week traces its roots to the spring of 2021, when Arkansas became the first state to pass a law prohibiting gender-transition treatments for minors. Alabama followed in 2022. Tennessee’s was part of a coordinated deluge: Of 28 states where Republicans control the legislature, 24 now restrict doctors from providing puberty blockers, hormone therapies or surgery to transgender minors. Two more, New Hampshire and Arizona, ban only surgeries.Why the flood? In exploring the motivation behind Florida’s ban, one federal district judge, Robert Hinkle, concluded that some of the state’s lawmakers acted on “old-fashioned discriminatory animus.” But Republican lawmakers in many states have said that they are seeking to shield adolescents from a path that has become more common, with consequences they are too young to fully comprehend. Republican strategists, for their part, have said that elevating the issue was a winning strategy leading up to the 2024 election.United States v. Skrmetti, the challenge to Tennessee’s ban, is one of 18 filed over the last three years, with mixed results. The highest courts in two states, Texas and Nebraska, have upheld their restrictions. By contrast, two federal district judges — Judge Hinkle in Florida and Judge James M. Moody Jr. in Arkansas — struck down bans in those states. But their decisions are being appealed, and preliminary injunctions on enforcement of the bans in Alabama and Indiana, each issued by a federal district judge, were reversed by separate appeals courts. Eleven other cases are in various stages of litigation.How the Supreme Court rules on Skrmetti will almost surely affect how lower courts handle the challenges to similar statutes in states across the country. But the outcome may not be universal.“If Tennessee wins, the states will say ‘Skrmetti controls,’ and vice versa,” said Jim Campbell, chief counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal advocacy group that is helping to defend Idaho’s ban on transition treatments for minors. “And then the other side, the losing side, will say, ‘No, it’s actually different, and here’s why.’” More

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      Australia Bans Social Media for Everyone Under 16

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      The law sets a minimum age for users of platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X. How the restriction will be enforced online remains an open question.Australia has imposed a sweeping ban on social media for children under 16, one of the world’s most comprehensive measures aimed at safeguarding young people from potential hazards online. But many details were still unclear, such as how it will be enforced and what platforms will be covered.After sailing through Parliament’s lower house on Wednesday, the bill passed the Senate on Thursday with bipartisan support. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said that it puts Australia at the vanguard of efforts to protect the mental health and well-being of children from detrimental effects of social media, such as online hate or bullying.The law, he has said, puts the onus on social media platforms to take “reasonable steps” to prevent anyone under 16 from having an account. Corporations could be fined up to 49.5 million Australian dollars (about $32 million) for “systemic” failures to implement age requirements.Neither underage users nor their parents will face punishment for violations. And whether children find ways to get past the restrictions is beside the point, Mr. Albanese said.“We know some kids will find workarounds, but we’re sending a message to social media companies to clean up their act,” he said in a statement this month.As with many countries’ regulations on alcohol or tobacco, the law will create a new category of “age-restricted social media platforms” accessible only to those 16 and older. How that digital carding will happen, though, is a tricky question.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Kids and Teenagers Are Getting Involved in Elections

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      Teens around the country are volunteering, canvassing and registering voters.This article is part of A Kid’s Guide to the Election, a collection of stories about the 2024 presidential election for readers ages 8 to 14, written and produced by The New York Times for Kids. This section is published in The Times’s print edition on the last Sunday of every month.You have to be 18 years old to vote in national elections. But you don’t have to be 18 to care — or to play a role. Young people can advocate for issues they care about, support candidates and make sure everyone is able to have their ballots counted. Here’s how kids and teens are getting involved in the election before they’re old enough to actually vote in it.Registering New VotersIt bothers Shivansh B., 17, that some people where he lives in Pleasanton, Calif., don’t seem to care much about voting. He wants to make people in his generation more active in democracy. For Shivansh, that means starting now. “I read an article that said that if you can get people to vote in their very first election, they’ll be voting for a lifetime,” he says. So he spent seven months organizing a rally for all 1,100 juniors and seniors at his high school to encourage them to register to vote for the first time. (In California, you can preregister at 16, so as soon as you turn 18 you’re able to vote.) Shivansh says he hopes to create “a ripple effect of people feeling empowered by their government.”Knocking on DoorsFor Bayly H., making a difference requires some serious footwork. The 17-year-old volunteers for her local state representative in Connecticut by canvassing, which means going door to door to speak directly with voters. She reminds them about the upcoming election, asks what issues matter to them and shares how her candidate promises to address their concerns. “You’re going to trust people in your community who have a conversation with you a lot more than you’re going to trust an ad you see on TV,” she says.Helping at the PollsThis Election Day, Maggie M., a high school senior, will be at a middle school that will serve as a voting site near her home in Fairfax, Va. She’ll show people where to cast their ballots, assist with curbside voting and hand out stickers. One thing she learned in a two-hour training session to be a high school election page is that poll workers have to keep their political views to themselves. The job isn’t to influence anyone’s decisions — it’s to make sure everyone has the “opportunity to vote and choose who gets to go into office,” she says. More

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      U.K. Plans Disposable Vape Ban in England

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      The measure, which echoes plans in Scotland and Wales, aims to protect young people’s health and reduce environmental damage.Disposable vapes will be banned in England starting in June under a government plan announced on Thursday, a move aimed at protecting young people’s health and reducing waste.Single-use vapes, which are often sold in brightly colored packaging, have become the “product of choice for the majority of kids vaping today,” Andrew Gwynne, the minister for public health and prevention, said in a government statement.An estimated five million disposable vapes are discarded each week in Britain, according to the government.The proposed ban — which requires the approval of Parliament, where the governing Labour Party holds a large majority — would prevent plastic, lead and mercury from single-use vapes leaching into the environment, the government said.It is also aimed at reducing problems caused by the disposal of lithium-ion batteries. Even when sent to recycling facilities, the government said, the products usually needed to be disassembled by hand, and the batteries posed a fire risk to workers in the waste industry.“Single-use vapes are extremely wasteful and blight our towns and cities,” Mary Creagh, an environment minister, said in the statement, adding that the initiative was part of an effort to combat Britain’s “throwaway culture.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More