'Toxic' influencer Andrew Tate blamed for rise in cases of school boys sexually harassing girls as young as 14
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: An increase in sexual assaults against female students in Australia's top private schools has been attributed to "toxic influencer" Andrew Tate. In Melbourne, a number of prestigious schools have reported receiving complaints from female students who claim several teenage boys have sexualized them online.
The girls allege that the boys, mostly from one all-boys school in the CBD, have been using the social media sites Discord and Snapchat to talk violently about them. One of the young girls, only 14 years of age, who was brave enough to show the disgusting chats about her.
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Teachers are blaming Andrew Tate, the controversial social media star, for the recent rise in male students' misogynistic behavior.
Feels like society is not headed in a good direction pic.twitter.com/N8VosWzx7t
— Liam (@Hezbolsonaro) August 18, 2022
The 35-year-old has become the world's most well-known womanizer in the past two months, rising from relative obscurity as a Big Brother contestant. A professional fight, in which the UK-born TikToker was knocked out, has recently surfaced on video, sparking controversy. "This sort of male toxic influencer s**t is fuelling it … this term for sure," one upset teacher told the Herald Sun.
Despite not having an account himself, TikTok is Tate's main social media platform. He is seen talking about hitting and abusing women, blaming victims, calling women "property," and saying that he prefers dating teenagers because it's simpler to make a "impression" on them in thousands of videos shared by his "fans." Tate is typically seen smoking cigars, traveling in private jets, sailing on lavish yachts, or driving fast cars in the few videos that don't show him in the middle of an obscenity-filled tirade.
Media outlets need to do more, according to former Miss Universe Australia Maria Thattil, who last year exposed a group of teenage boys for sexualizing their classmates. "The longer they take, the longer they support the platform of these people at the expense of women's safety," she said. "They're (boys) buying what these people are putting out there, where they're objectifying women's bodies and using misogynistic language that glorifies sexual violence."
In a popular video, Tate debates whether women should be expected to handle all household chores, saying: "Girls go, 'I don't like cleaning.' No problem, how about this... if you dislike cleaning, I'll get the house clean and you pay for everything! Oh no, you can't do that either because you're a f**king m**on and you realise making money is much harder than getting some f**king dishes washed."
Tate describes how he would attack a woman if she accused him of cheating in another video. "It's bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up b****," he said. After learning that more than half of the average teenage boy's TikTok feed is related to Tate's content, The Project panelist Rachel Corbett and Australian influencer Abbie Chatfield shared their opinions on him last Sunday. "Kids look at Instagram and TikTok and the idea of 11.6 billion views as a success," Corbett said. "That then says that those (misogynistic) views must be good because look at how famous (Tate) is, so then I want to emulate that. It's just really dangerous and I feel like TikTok has a responsibility to remove misogynistic posts."
According to TikTok's community guidelines, it "no longer tolerates discrimination" and will "remove content that contains hate speech or involves hateful behavior." Tate's insulting speeches about women were nonetheless permitted to receive billions of views. Chatfield contrasted Tate's content with her own in terms of how TikTok applies its community guidelines. "I uploaded a TikTok in a white singlet, with a bra on, and it got deleted in a minute," she said. "But there's endless videos of him saying that women are property and other extremely, vilely misogynistic things. How does that slip through the cracks but me in a singlet can't?" she added.