‘Andrew Tate is in the classroom’

After an hour at a careers panel fielding questions from comprehensive-aged students, I walked off the small stage into a green room.

A handful of exam-aged students were there to gain a further understanding of journalism and try their chances for an opportunity to do some work experience.

A fleeting conversation with a teenager had confirmed my thoughts of how social media is shaping some young minds and left me slightly stunned, albeit not surprised.

Succinctly, the teenage girl described how some boys in school were parroting the rhetoric broadcast by far-right misogynistic influencers.

She daily has some boys tell her a woman should not be in the workplace and, apparently, a teenage boy even delivered a presentation defending the view that a woman's place is at home.

“It’s sad how women have progressed so much and now we have to deal with this,” she said.

That sentence floored me. I’d never had a problem with this in school and now, 15 years later, a teenage girl is saying she does.

She continued that this is particularly sad as hers is one of the first local student cohorts to spend all their school years in co-education.

I had just spent an hour sat on a light beige leather sofa, microphone in hand, in a majority women panel in a frank question and answer session with around 50 students.

Alongside my colleagues in media, we discussed the relentless news cycle, long hours and work/life balance.

Towards the tail-end of the discussion, a student raised their hand and softly asked: “How do I get promotions?”

My answer was to work hard, alongside a good attitude and willingness to learn.

No one questioned women working, but according to this teenager it's a daily occurrence.

I parked it in the back of my mind, after all International Women’s Day was in a few days’ time.

I didn’t attend the Gibraltar Government’s conference, but we had journalists there and, when editing their work, I listened back to the audio recordings of speeches to fill in some gaps.

A Westside School student, Caitlyn Bautista, took to the lectern.

“Andrew Tate is in our classrooms,” she said to a packed-out Sunborn ballroom.

Sitting watching were Government officials, including the Minister for Equality, Christian Santos, representatives from various organisations, and the Governor, Lt Gen Sir Ben Bathurst.

She told the audience she has often found herself debating with her male classmates about their “unapologetically sexist ideas”.

She described how she has seen the pendulum swing to patriarchal ideals in her own classroom.

“I’ve heard my male classmates parrot openly sexist statements and defend individuals such as [Andrew] Tate, a man who has said, for example, that rape victims must bear the responsibility for their attacks,” she said.

“This rhetoric clearly doesn’t stay within the confines of social media.”

Let it sink in.

A teenager said this to a room full of adults at an International Women’s Day event meant for embracing equality.

Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed misogynist who is currently facing human trafficking and rape charges in Romania – charges he denies - is now banned from Facebook, Instagram and TikTok but has more than 10 million followers on Elon Musk’s platform X.

Despite being banned his videos still appear, reposted by fan accounts, across social media platforms.

This issue, however, doesn’t end with Andrew Tate.

Similar content by less controversial creators with smaller follower counts lives on all the platforms.

Someone may not like Andrew Tate, but they might like another influencer broadcasting the same ideas without even realising it.

Recently, for example, I spoke to a young man who told me he doesn’t like Andrew Tate.

In the same breath, however, he described his relationships with women and perhaps did not recognise how he spoke about his ‘conquests’ with unashamed bravado.

To him these women were not people, they were numbers.

As this increasingly uncomfortable conversation rattled on, coincidentally I received a message on my phone from Childline Gibraltar CEO Caroline Carter.

Childline has launched a campaign for teenagers on healthy relationships and she wanted me to write about it.

Her timing felt impeccable.

Concerns about the impact of social media does not just centre on the young though, it affects all ages too.

Chief Minister Fabian Picardo recently dedicated time during a half-hour live television broadcast remembering the Covid-19 pandemic to comment on general online misinformation.

In his view, online misinformation took hold of some people’s mind during the pandemic.

“The age of misinformation took hold as so many were confined to their homes,” he said.

“This has led to mistrust by some of us in the institutions that helped to save the lives of all of us.”

“But whilst our institutions are, of course, fallible, they are also extraordinary and worth preserving because challenges continue to face us.”

It’s worth remembering though that while the concerns are genuine and rooted in real-world experience, there is an alternative view, as expressed during another careers event by some teenage girls I spoke to.

Their focus was to be driven and successful in their fields, and “have it all”.

These young girls said they have never been made to feel different, and even if they had it wouldn’t have mattered to them.

They know what they want out of life.

Anyone who comments otherwise, in their view, should simply be ignored.