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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

SocietyAugust 20, 2022

Andrew Tate is a new virus in our schools

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

The internet personality’s ugly misogyny is a new pandemic infecting schools across the country, write two young teachers.

We are two young female educators who work at an all-boys secondary school in New Zealand. In the last few weeks we have noticed an increasing addiction to Andrew Tate among our students, especially our juniors aged 12-14. His name has become our school’s own pandemic that we currently have no treatment for, let alone an effective cure.

As The Spinoff explained earlier this week, Tate is a hugely popular online influencer who has made a career out of brutal misogyny. Our students have quickly become unhealthily obsessed with him and the violent views he puts out into the world. This obsession is even influencing our most unlikely students – and it’s making itself apparent not only in their own interactions, but also how they treat female members of staff.

Andrew Tate (Image: Supplied / Tina Tiller)

Recently one of our more reserved students approached one of us at the end of a lesson, without prompting, and confidently asked: “Do you think a woman still has the right to say ‘my body my choice’ after she’s had two previous abortions?” He seemed very sure that having an abortion means she “loses that right” and also the “right to claim motherhood”. We’ve also heard boys echo Tate’s claims that women who are sexually assaulted are “asking for it” because of what they wear and that “some women dress like hookers”. Even students who may not directly engage in these conversations still often laugh along with the “jokes” or use images of Tate in presentations to get a laugh from their peers.

The boys we teach see Tate as a strong male role model who embodies what it is to be a successful man. Boys as young as 12 or 13 are confidently identifying him as their “idol” and expressing the desire to live the life he has. While we encourage our young men to have positive role models and clear future ambitions, we are sure that one espousing such clear misogyny, violence and criminal activity is one we cannot support. Our biggest concern is that our students are beginning to fundamentally believe that success is synonymous with abusing women.

Sexual violence has now become a part of their everyday vocabulary. We are hearing increasingly more open and loud conversations threatening rape or joking about rape. The boys are making no attempt to hide these conversations; this topic does not embarrass them any more or make them feel uncomfortable when challenged or questioned. As young female teachers, you can imagine how genuinely terrifying this is. These blase comments have even infiltrated younger school communities. One of our teaching colleagues told us her Year 8 daughter asked her what a “slut” is last night because the “boys at school were calling us sluts for having short skirts”. We believe that an 11-year-old having “slut” as part of her vocabulary, years before she should even learn the word, is a direct result of the Andrew Tate phenomenon.

On multiple occasions we’ve had to explain in depth to our boys why we do not want Andrew Tate’s name in our classroom. We’ve explained how he genuinely terrifies us as women. We’ve then had to explain further that we do not wish to speak about a man who has a history of physically abusing women, does not believe survivors of sexual assault and does not value us or the education we provide. While a lot of the boys seem to have taken what we say on board, we’re finding ourselves having to engage in the same conversation multiple times to multiple classes.

We have tried to combat the growing influence of Andrew Tate by opening a conversation aimed at teaching our students about basic morality. Young people learn from being able to express their thoughts with someone they trust. We are currently pushing for a school-wide policy on addressing this radicalisation of our young students. We do not believe this should ever be a fight that a single teacher, more specifically one of our young female teachers, is forced to engage in alone. This phenomenon has alerted us to the fact that our education system does not have a universal approach to misogyny. There is no age limit for teaching young people about human rights, feminism and the dangers of radicalisation. They need to see it modelled in everyday actions, interactions and behaviour. We do not want the topic of equality to be controversial – we are fighting for the opposite. We aim to raise empathetic and self-aware young men who want to combat inequality.

As educators, we are responsible for only a small part of the shaping of these young men and their attitudes. We are unable to control what they watch and listen to at home. For misogyny to be overcome it needs to be addressed in all aspects of a student’s life. We implore parents: do your own research into Andrew Tate and have an open and honest conversation with your children about this dangerous man.

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Alice Neville
— Deputy editor
Keep going!
Michael Falesiu in Auckland Theatre Company and Pacific Underground’s production of Oscar Kightley’s Dawn Raids. (Photo: Andi Crown Photography)
Michael Falesiu in Auckland Theatre Company and Pacific Underground’s production of Oscar Kightley’s Dawn Raids. (Photo: Andi Crown Photography)

SocietyAugust 19, 2022

Dawn Raids rips away the headlines to reach the heart of a national outrage

Michael Falesiu in Auckland Theatre Company and Pacific Underground’s production of Oscar Kightley’s Dawn Raids. (Photo: Andi Crown Photography)
Michael Falesiu in Auckland Theatre Company and Pacific Underground’s production of Oscar Kightley’s Dawn Raids. (Photo: Andi Crown Photography)

A 25th anniversary production of Oscar Kightley’s seminal work Dawn Raids vividly brings history into the present, writes Sam Brooks.

The lowdown

Oscar Kightley’s Dawn Raids, first produced in 1997 by theatre collective Pacific Underground, makes its Auckland mainstage debut one year after prime minister Jacinda Ardern formally apologised to the Pasifika community for the government’s actions in the 1970s. The play tells the story of one Sāmoan family during one of the most shameful eras in our country’s history, but also explores what the entire community went through at the time.

Auckland Theatre Company collaborates with Pacific Underground on this new production, supporting a great many Pasifika artists to make their mainstage debut, bringing the play to a new generation of theatregoers and reopening the conversation that Kightley ignited back in 1997.

Bella Kalolo-Suraj in Auckland Theatre Company and Pacific Underground’s production of Dawn Raids. (Photo: Andi Crown Photography)

The good

Simply put, Pacific Underground and Auckland Theatre Company have delivered a production that feels worthy of a 25th anniversary. It would be easy for the topic’s importance to settle on the show like a deadweight, but directors Troy Tu’a and Tanya Muagututi’a keep the show alive with a powerful core cast, a 10-strong ensemble and a live band.

That core cast have to play their own vividly-painted characters while also representing a generation’s worth of hurt. There is obvious tragedy in the story of Sione, a singer who pretends to be Hawaiian rather than Sāmoan at his pub gigs, and Fuarosa, his fiancee who is practically housebound lest she be discovered as an overstayer. But the moments that really sink in deep are delivered by the play’s older characters. I suspect it’ll take me a long time to forget the way Bella Kalolo-Suraj’s To’aga quietly pushes a tissue back up her sleeve, as though she’s tamping down decades of unspoken grief, or how Lauie Tofa’s Mose snaps when the happiness he’s been clinging to is suddenly taken away from him.

The play feels as much educational as it does cathartic; we’re further from the play’s debut than that production was from the actual raids, and there are moments when the history lesson is made blatant. If we get to enjoy Sione’s feelgood Elvis covers in the early part of the play, then we can’t look away when his friends are shoved into the back of vans by cops later on. We have to pay attention, we have to acknowledge, and we have to learn. It’s a history lesson in the best way; depicted by real people, not read about in books.

Talia-Rae Mavaega in Auckland Theatre Company and Pacific Underground’s production of Oscar Kightley’s Dawn Raids. (Photo: Andi Crown Photography)

The not-so-good

The fact that this production is celebrating the 25th anniversary immediately draws attention to the script’s age. If it feels very much like a play from the late 90s, that’s simply because it is. A layer of dust has settled on the words that takes a good half hour for the production to blow off, but once it does, it’s a smooth ride to the finish. It’s a difficult task to update the bare bones naturalism of Dawn Raids in a way that helps it fill the cavernous ASB Waterfront Theatre stage; this is a show that almost seems to demand the inelegant trope of fading to black while people move the set around onstage. That’s not a strike against the play or the production itself – a 25-year-old play is in the uncanny valley between “classic” and “modern” – but rather the context we’re seeing it in.

For the Auckland theatre community, the programming of this show feels like one part anniversary and one part apology. Dawn Raids should have been on a stage of this size, of this import, a literal 10 minutes from the suburb in which it’s set, when it was first written in 1997. You can’t help but watch this production and wonder what doors might have been flung open had it been.

The verdict

See Dawn Raids. Shows like this only get staged if people see them, and shows like this only get written if the powers-that-be stage them. Not only is Dawn Raids a light shone on a shameful part of our nation’s history, it’s also a spotlight on an important part of our theatrical history.

Dawn Raids runs until September 3 at the ASB Waterfront Theatre. You can book tickets here.

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