Adolescence is not just a TV drama – it is a disturbing glimpse into the minds of thousands of young British boys warped by the extreme violence and sexual abuse they are witnessing every day online.

This week, many parents up and down the country will have been watching the brilliant and disturbing Netflix series Adolescence and asking themselves: how real is this?

Before I became a Home Office Minister eight months ago, I had never heard of Com networks, and I would guess that only a tiny percentage of people reading this newspaper have done so either.

But what the crime experts in the Home Office warned me was that ‘The Com’ is one of the biggest threats facing young boys in our country: a loose affiliation of online networks operating in the encrypted shadows of social media and instant messaging platforms, dedicated to sharing the most gruesome images of death, violence, gore and sexual assault, including against children.

Every day, members of these networks scroll through video after video of beheadings, shootings and rape in the same way that most of us would scan the news headlines or clips from TV. 

And in an online community where the extreme has become the norm, users have to plunge into ever more sickening depths to find content that their peers will consider worthy of watching. That includes generating imagery through AI, harming themselves and, of course, hurting others.

The UK is a world leader in detecting and tackling online child sexual abuse and exploitation, including Com networks. 

The National Crime Agency is collaborating with law enforcement agencies right around the globe – from the Philippines to the USA, the DRC to New Zealand – to identify vulnerable children, prevent vile material being shared and to take down the perpetrators committing these vile crimes. But we know we need to do more.

Adolescence is not just a TV drama – it is a disturbing glimpse into the minds of thousands of young British boys warped by the extreme violence they witness online, writes safeguarding minister JESS PHILLIPS

Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller in Netflix’s Adolescence. Many parents will have been watching the brilliant series and asking: how real is this?

Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller (left) with Graham as Stephen Miller. We can ask all the questions we want about what we’ve seen on Adolescence, but we need to have real discussion with young men about the danger these online communities pose

We are taking urgent action in the crime and policing bill to tackle the use of AI to create child abuse images, sometimes used to blackmail young people, or to teach others how to use AI technology to spread this kind of criminal, cruel and sadistic technology.

And our new policing performance unit will also be used to monitor how proactive police forces are being in tackling online child sexual abuse, looking across the country at how these crimes are approached from reports from victims through to conviction.

This slide into the abyss is not something any responsible government can tolerate, so as well as acting on the threats from individual youth obsessions with extreme violence or sexual abuse, we must continue to urge the tech companies and social media platforms to show some responsibility themselves about the horrors taking place inside their encrypted chatrooms.

But this has to go wider — we need a whole society approach. Each parent, and every adult in a position of influence over young people, has a role to play as well.

We can watch Adolescence, and ask ourselves all the questions we want about what we’ve seen. 

But we need to have real discussion with young men about the danger these online communities pose, about how real that threat is to them, and why – for the sake of their minds, their souls, and their futures – it must be avoided at all costs.