“While girls are often the focus of discussions around online harassment, boys are equally vulnerable. The stigma around boys expressing vulnerability can make it even harder for them to seek help, leaving them isolated in their experiences.”
– UNICEF
This quote lingers. Because it speaks to something that so often gets missed when we talk about young people and the internet. It’s not just about what they’re doing online—but about what they’re feeling, and what they’re carrying silently with them.
Watching Adolescence was like watching those quiet weights come to the surface. It wasn’t dramatic—it was raw, vulnerable, full of those small, hard-to-express moments that define growing up. The show holds up a mirror to how gender, emotion, shame, and longing are experienced by teens—offline and online—and how deeply our social scripts shape their behaviour.
Masculinity and femininity don’t start online. They’re learned early—in school corridors, at dinner tables, in whispered warnings. But the digital world amplifies them. What is expected offline is performed and policed more intensely online. Girls are taught to be expressive but not too visible, confident but not too bold. Boys are taught to be silent, detached, invulnerable. Online, this gets sharper. More eyes. More judgement. More algorithms rewarding the same old roles.
Even emojis start to carry the weight of these performances. A red heart can feel too open. A blue one feels safer. A fire emoji becomes a way to say something without really saying it. The red pill—once a symbol of awakening—is now co-opted by corners of the internet that promise power, while quietly cutting boys off from softness, care, and emotional honesty. And so many follow, not because they believe, but because they feel unseen everywhere else.
These digital performances don’t emerge in a vacuum. They’re fed by offline realities—by what we tell boys about control and what we tell girls about caution. And when there’s no space to question those roles, the internet doesn’t just reflect them—it reinforces them.
But this doesn’t have to be the story we stick with.
Across India, organizations like the Centre for Social Research, ACTS (Alliance For Cyber Trust & Safety), Breakthrough Trust;Public Policy India, Feminism in India, Fortis Healthcare, SASHA India, Youth Ki Awaaz, One Future Collective, Responsible Netism, Red Dot Foundation, Women Power Connect, Cyber Blog India, Civis, Ethics by Design, CRY,CGAP, Sakshi, Centre for Communication Governance, Logically Facts, Nyaaya; and others are helping rewrite that script. They’re creating space for young people to question what they’ve been taught, and to reimagine how they want to be—online and off. They’re teaching not just safety, but emotional awareness, digital agency, and self-trust. They’re opening up conversations around consent, gender, power, and vulnerability—conversations many never had the chance to have in the real world.
Policy needs to follow that lead. Digital literacy can’t just be about protecting passwords. It has to be about emotional fluency, about platform responsibility, about creating systems that honour complexity instead of punishing it. Because what young people need isn’t just protection from harm—it’s space to become.
Growing up online is layered, complicated, often lonely. But it can also be expansive—if we allow for more honest stories, more generous tools, and more room to feel without fear.
We owe them that much.
