Victorian schools to use Andrew Tate as weapon against online misogyny

Victorian teachers will be given more tools to help battle the influence of “Andrew Tate types” and other forms of online toxic masculinity in schools.

The state government on Wednesday will announce an updated Respectful Relationships teaching program with new course content specifically aimed at “manfluencers” such as Tate, amid a fresh drive to get the program into more Catholic and independent schools.

Students will be taught to recognise online toxic masculinity, hate speech, and material promoting or condoning coercive control, and learn skills to resist peer pressure and counter “alpha male” talking points and arguments.

Deakin University Associate Professor Debbie Ollis, who developed the updated material alongside the University of Melbourne’s Professor Helen Cahill, said Respectful Relationships also taught young men to recognise harmful behaviour in themselves.

Ollis told The Age it was common to find classes where up to 20 per cent of students had “crawled down the Andrew Tate rabbit hole”, and that there were clear links between online influencers and real-world violence and abuse.

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When the program – a key recommendation of the state Labor government’s Royal Commission into Family Violence – was rolled out across state schools in 2016, Tate was an obscure figure and the “manosphere” was an emerging internet phenomenon.

But the subsequent growth of the online reach of the former kickboxer and other so-called “alpha male” influencers now has educators, parents and mental health experts worried about the radicalisation of teenagers and young men into extreme misogynist ideology.

With several Victorian schools rocked recently by high-profile instances of deepfake pornography, attacks against female students by their male peers, and other forms of online misogynistic behaviour, Respectful Relationships has been updated to reflect the new social environment.