An alarming number of Australian schoolboys are being radicalised by misogynistic online content, and it’s causing some women teachers to leave the profession, writes Lucy Meyer.
Caroline* had never heard of influencer Andrew Tate until her 10-year-old students created a slideshow in honour of the self-described misogynist, who is currently awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking in Romania.
The Year 5 boys interspersed clips of Tate saying derogatory things about women with photos they had taken of their female classmates to body-shame the girls.
“I was horrified,” says Caroline, a principal at a primary school in NSW and an IEU member.
After a distressed teacher reported the incident, Caroline googled Tate and began watching his content. What she saw made her angry.
Tate is a British-American former professional kickboxer and reality contestant known for his violent rhetoric against women. He preaches a particular brand of ‘masculinity’ centred on wealth, fast cars, cigar smoking, physical strength, male supremacy, and the denigration of women. At one point, he was the eighth most-googled person in the world.
His influence is now permeating Australian classrooms. The Man Cave, a mental health charity, surveyed 1300 Australian schoolboys and found that a quarter look up to Tate as a role model. And that’s having a devastating impact on many of the women who teach them.
New research from Monash University academics Stephanie Wescott and Steven Roberts has found a “widespread experience of sexual harassment, sexism, and misogyny perpetrated by boys towards women teachers, and the ominous presence of Andrew Tate shaping their behaviour”.
They describe schoolboys undergoing a process of radicalisation. Their findings point to a pattern of behaviour that includes physical intimidation, gaslighting, belittling, and an attitude of entitlement.
Leaving the profession
For some teachers, going to work can be like “going into battle”, Wescott says. The academics interviewed women teachers from across the country, who spoke of work environments that felt so unsafe that some went part-time, moved to an all-girls school or left teaching altogether.
The research is touching a nerve, with teachers reaching out to Wescott. “I get a lot of messages that say things like ‘thank you so much for talking about this’ or ‘this is why I left teaching’ or ‘it’s so bad, you have no idea’.”
Rebecca* can understand why the rise of misogynist influencers is causing teachers to quit. “Absolutely, in a heartbeat,” says Rebecca, who is an IEU member and head teacher at a co-educational secondary school in NSW. “Why would you subject yourself to that every day?”
Disrupting learning
A group of Year 11 boys passionately defended Tate in Rebecca’s class, arguing he had been framed, a claim Tate himself makes. The students saw Tate’s arrest “as a real injustice”, she says.
Tate’s messaging has disrupted learning in other classes at Rebecca’s school. It can be hard for women teachers to combat, she says. “Even if you’re a strong female teacher, that just plays into what Tate says about women.” If a female teacher responds assertively, she can be disparaged for not behaving in the docile way Tate says women should.
Caroline has seen how difficult it can be to bring students back from the brink. Her students’ behaviour didn’t end with their slideshow. “I think by then, the damage had been done in terms of the boys, because some of those misogynistic comments continued throughout the year. So, it was almost like the seed had been planted.”
Enduring impact
When female teachers at Vanessa’s* school challenged the Tate narrative their students parroted, the boys doubled down, dismissing their teachers with misogynistic language, the IEU member says.
A house leader, Vanessa intervened in three different classes last year after boys inserted Tate into classroom activities. She has seen the impact on her colleagues. “They felt undermined. They felt disrespected. And in some ways, I would say it was abusive,” she says.
As Wescott and Roberts found, such incidents are also leaving a mark on female students. At Caroline’s school, two boys who made the slideshow continued to body-shame a girl for the rest of the year. “That student needed counselling and a lot of extra support through the family and through teachers’ aides and other teachers,” Caroline says.
Seeing the impact on their female students can cause more distress for teachers when they feel powerless to change it, say Wescott and Roberts.
The researchers found that too often, when teachers report these issues, they aren’t taken seriously or believed by their school leaders and male colleagues. Many are told, “you don’t have the skin for it”, says Wescott.
Change is possible
If schools are going to address the radicalisation of some of their male pupils, Wescott and Roberts say they need to start by believing teachers, naming the problem, and recording incidents.
Too many schools use online systems that have no option for reporting sexism, and “you can’t make a solution for something that hasn’t been measured”, says Roberts.
Some schools engage organisations such as the Man Cave to facilitate workshops, but Roberts says these interventions are too sporadic to create lasting behavioural change.
Earlier this year, the federal government announced a $3.5 million Healthy Masculinities project to counter harmful messages from social media for school-aged boys.
Caroline, Rebecca and Vanessa tried various approaches to tackle incidents in their schools – with differing degrees of success – including talking to students and teachers and sending letters home to parents. Vanessa found that showing parents examples of disturbing things Tate had said had a positive impact, but she acknowledges that not all parents are so receptive.
“Teachers are the ones who always try to mend the social fabric of society,” says Rebecca. “But they can’t do it without parents.”
Wescott believes change is possible. “We’ve had broad behavioural and attitudinal change in schools before, like we’ve got a zero-tolerance approach to bullying now,” she says.
Wescott sees no reason a similar campaign on gendered violence in schools can’t foster “a system-wide cultural shift”.
These boys will soon grow into men, she says. In the midst of a national crisis of men’s violence, she and Roberts believe the radicalisation of Australia’s schoolboys cannot be ignored.
*Names have been changed
