This week the British social media influencer Andrew Tate has been in court in Romania after he and his brother Tristan were arrested on suspicion of human trafficking and rape. Stories about the millionaire former kickboxer have been circulating in newspapers. These touch on his misogynistic beliefs and the crimes he has been accused of, including grooming young women and forcing them to produce pornographic videos. Yet he has a huge following among young men in the UK. I had never heard of him until seeing his name in recent news headlines, yet last year he was one of the most Googled people in the world and before being shut down, his TikTok account had more than 11 billion views.
I asked my 14-year-old son if he had heard of Tate, “Oh yes, he’s pretty popular with boys at school,” he replied. This really concerned me, so I pressed him further about whether had watched any of the videos himself. “Yeah, they pop on my feed sometimes,” he said. “He’s funny, talks about making money and driving fast cars.”
Having looked at some of Andrew Tate’s videos it’s easy to see why he’s so popular with boys. He addresses subjects that we are told not to talk about including the issue that men are physically stronger than women. In a world where we are not allowed to discuss the differences between males and females, or the fact that allowing trans-identified women to compete against biological women in sports is ridiculously unfair, a man who is honest about these issues is refreshing.
That’s the problem with predatory men – most abusers are charming and charismatic to begin with – this is how they operate. Many young Muslim men have become fixated with Tate and his attitudes towards women and girls, which should be hugely concerning to anyone who has read the reports into child sexual exploitation in towns such as Rotherham. (Our report Unprotected goes into more detail about this.)
But demonizing Andrew Tate won’t solve the problem of why many teenage boys idolise him. Boys need good male role models, and in the absence of decent ones, they gravitate towards men like Tate who at least talk about masculinity in a positive way.
This shouldn’t be hard to understand when boys and men, particularly working-class white males, are constantly being told that masculinity is toxic, that they aren’t good enough or that their opinions don’t matter. A recent viral video showed an interviewer asking people in London the question “what are men good for” – a question which was universally met with silence or disparaging remarks. When asked “what are women good for?”, the answer was unanimously “everything”.
My son is lucky, he has a father at home who he can talk to about what it means to be a man, and the importance of treating women with respect. Fathers are important, yet a quarter of children in the UK (almost three million children) live in single parent families, with 90% living with just their mother. When families break up, the child’s contact with their father is often the first casualty. MARRI found that ‘by adolescence…fewer than half of children living with separated, divorced, or remarried mothers had seen their fathers at all in more than a year’
Children are told from the earliest age that this doesn’t matter as there are all kinds of different families. The Book Trust recommends picture books for babies and toddlers under the age of 5 which normalise the idea of “two mums” or “two dads”.
This year in September, the Modern Family Show will inform LGBTQ+ attendees about “UK, Canadian and some European family building options, including Surrogacy and IVF/IUI, Adoption, Fostering, Co-Parenting, Fertility Preservation, Solo Parenting, and Egg/Sperm Donation.” It comes as no surprise that the Modern Family Show’s charity partner, which will receive 50% of ticket sales, is Mermaids – the perfect partnership for a charity which encourages vulnerable children down a pathway of medical gender transition which can cause irreversible harm, sexual dysfunction and infertility.
Events like this are promoted as inclusive and progressive while those of us who stand up for the right of children to be raised by their biological mothers and fathers are shouted down as bigoted. But the evidence doesn’t lie, we are failing children, particularly boys, if we ignore the importance of fathers. According to the Centre for Social Justice, 76% of children and young people in custody had an absent father. The absence of a father leaves a vacuum which is often filled by someone with ‘street credibility’ – if not Andrew Tate, there will always be someone equally unpleasant to fill the void.
As the author Meg Meeker says in her book “Boys Should Be Boys: 7 secrets to raising healthy sons”:
“…today that natural, healthy boyhood is under attack. It is threatened not only by an educational establishment that devalues masculinity and boyishness, and not only by widely remarked social changes including widespread divorce and the rise of single-parent households that deprive boys of the responsible fathers they need, but by a noxious popular culture that is as degrading to boys as it is dangerous to girls.”
The Telegraph journalist Madeline Grant is right when she says in her article about young men in crisis that we need to focus more on the “contentment associated with love and family; and positive aspects of masculinity – risk-taking, gallantry, duty – to highlight alongside the relentlessly negative. We need better role models, such as the rugby star Courtney Lawes who has championed the institution of marriage, or the footballer Bukayo Saka, who often speaks about the importance of his Christian faith. And, of course, the brave young men who are being put to death in Iran every day, fighting for their sisters.”
We ignore at our peril the crisis facing young men and boys. Half of all women killed in the UK die at the hands of their partner or ex-partner and ONS figures show that 1.6 million women in England and Wales have experienced domestic abuse.
We don’t want a whole generation of Andrew Tates – can the real men please stand up?
Lucy Marsh, Communications Manager at Family Education Trust