Something has been building in the Australian media over the past few months, and it is worth paying attention to, because the destination of this campaign is not especially mysterious. In August, the University of Melbourne publicised research on misogyny, online radicalisation and youth extremism in Australia, based on surveys of 1,122 teenagers aged 13–17 and 2,307 adults. The researchers reported that hostile attitudes towards women were a particularly strong predictor of support for violent extremism, cutting across ideological categories. In July, researchers and practitioners gathered in Melbourne for the Masculinities and Misogyny Online conference. In August, the ABC's 7.30 ran a segment built around research involving QUT, Deakin University and Dublin City University, interviewing a young man who described himself as having been "radicalised" by the manosphere at twenty. Earlier in the year, the Australian eSafety Commissioner published an Online Safety Advisory on the manosphere in conjunction with the release of a Louis Theroux Netflix documentary. Taken together, the media, academic and political interest has increasingly identified the Australian boy as a public-policy problem requiring intervention.
It does not take an enormous amount of imagination to work out where this is going, because we have seen the playbook before. A moral panic pushed by the academic and media class is being used to manufacture consent for online speech and censorship laws, and the panic has been carefully constructed so that the most awkward facts never enter the same paragraph as the proposed remedy.
The framing of many of these stories is that young men are moving Right and that this represents some sort of existential emergency. The first part contains an element of truth: young men in a number of Western countries have become more conservative relative to young women, although the size and nature of the movement varies considerably between countries. What is less frequently emphasised is the striking political divergence between young men and young women, with young women in several Western democracies considerably more supportive of parties of the Left and Greens than young men.
In the United States, the political gender gap among younger voters has become substantial. In Britain, young women have been much more likely than young men to support the Greens, while Reform has attracted considerably more support from young men than young women. In Australia the gap is milder, and younger voters of both sexes remain generally to the Left of older Australians, but young women show substantially stronger support for the Greens while young men are relatively more conservative than their female counterparts.
What this means is that the much-discussed movement of young men cannot sensibly be examined without examining the simultaneous political movement of young women. Yet the media class treating male movement to the Right as "radicalisation" while treating a substantial female movement to the Left as normal, healthy or invisible is a political choice about whose attitudes are permitted to count as a crisis. A young man who moves toward the Coalition or another party of the Right becomes a potential subject for discussion about radicalisation; a young woman who moves toward the Greens is ordinarily understood simply to be exercising her political agency. The asymmetry is the tell.
The second thing that is almost always under-appreciated, or outright omitted from the conversation, is that support for the most notorious manosphere personalities is not confined primarily to White men. Yet much media coverage implicitly constructs the young White boy as the archetypal subject of online misogynistic radicalisation, often through visual cues rather than demographic evidence. Netflix's Adolescence helped turn the White British schoolboy exposed to misogynistic online culture into an international cultural image. The ABC's 7.30 segment similarly centred its story upon a young White Australian named Flynn describing his movement into the manosphere.
The British polling on Andrew Tate's audience complicates that picture considerably, and it has the useful feature of coming from organisations that can hardly be accused of sympathising with Tate. A 2023 Savanta survey of 1,214 UK 16-to-25-year-olds found that 15 percent of White respondents had a positive view of Andrew Tate, compared with 31 percent of Asian respondents and 41 percent of Black respondents. Ethnic-minority respondents in that survey were therefore substantially more likely than White respondents to view Tate positively. Young men overall were also much more favourable towards Tate than young women, but ethnicity produced a striking difference in the results.
The next dataset comes from HOPE not hate, an organisation firmly opposed to far-Right politics. Its 2024 polling of 2,040 people aged 16–24 reported positive views of Tate among 41 percent of Asian or Asian British respondents and 36 percent of Black or Black British respondents. Among young Muslims the figure was 51 percent, while among young Muslim men it reached 72 percent, compared with 25 percent among young Muslim women. Whatever else one thinks about Tate, these figures make it difficult to sustain a simple picture in which his constituency consists overwhelmingly of disaffected young White men.
If the media and political class had genuine concern for who is absorbing this content, the ethnic and religious pattern should at least form part of the discussion. Australia has run a high-migration programme that includes migration from societies with widely differing attitudes towards gender, family authority and sexuality. That fact is rarely allowed into the same discussion as "rape culture" and the manosphere because it raises questions considerably more complicated than blaming the stereotypical "straight White male." The British polling, at minimum, demonstrates that the demographic reality surrounding figures such as Tate is more complicated than that stereotype suggests.
The recurring claim in Australian gender politics, the frame that helped make Chanel Contos a national figure, is that there is a "rape culture" sitting inside ordinary Australian society and that one appropriate remedy is educational intervention directed at Australian boys. But determining how sexual offending is distributed among different population groups is surprisingly difficult using Australia's standard published crime statistics.
Australia does publish some information concerning offender birthplace. For example, ABS analysis of sexual-assault prisoners over the period 2010–2019 found that around 80 percent were Australian-born. That statistic is important and should not be concealed. But prisoner numbers are not the same thing as population-adjusted offending rates, and Australia does not routinely publish national sexual-offending statistics broken down by offender country of birth, parental country of birth or migration background in a form permitting the sort of population-adjusted comparisons available in some European countries. The standard ABS Recorded Crime-Offenders tables do not provide an Australian equivalent of the detailed origin-based crime indices published in Denmark.
Knowing that most offenders are Australian-born tells us little by itself about relative rates between population groups when the overwhelming majority of the population is itself Australian-born. To answer that question requires both offender numbers and appropriate population denominators, preferably accompanied by age standardisation and other relevant controls. Australia does not routinely provide a comprehensive national dataset permitting that calculation for sexual offending by migration background.
Denmark does. Statistics Denmark and the Danish Justice Ministry publish crime statistics examining offending and convictions according to origin, including Danish origin, immigrants and descendants of immigrants, with further distinctions between Western and non-Western backgrounds. The Danish analyses also use adjustments intended to deal with demographic differences such as age, an essential precaution because immigrant populations can have very different age structures from native populations. Official Danish statistics still show a clear pattern after the age adjustment that is supposed to stop apples-to-oranges comparisons. Statistics Denmark and the Ministry of Justice classify people as of Danish origin, immigrants, or descendants, and then split immigrants and descendants into Western and non-Western origin. Because non-Western groups are younger than the native population, raw conviction counts overstate their share; the published crime index therefore standardises for age (and, in the ministry tables, for group size), with 100 as the rate for the relevant male population as a whole. On that basis, male descendants of non-Western immigrants remain the most over-represented group. In the Justice Ministry's 2023 analysis they had an age-adjusted index of 262 for Penal Code offences, about 2.6 times the male average, and 293 for violent crime, almost 2.9 times. For more serious violence the descendant index rose to 367, against 179 for non-Western immigrant men themselves. Country-of-origin detail in Indvandrere i Danmark 2025 is sharper still: male descendants with Lebanese origin had an index around 386; Somali, Syrian and Iraqi descendant men around 316, 312 and 268. Those are small cohorts, so a handful of extra convictions moves the index, but the direction is consistent across years. Two caveats belong in the same paragraph. First, most recorded crime in Denmark is still committed by people of Danish origin simply because they are most of the population: Danish citizens accounted for about 80 percent of convictions in 2024. Second, youth conviction rates have fallen in every ancestry group over twenty years, including among young non-Western descendants, from about 21 percent convicted in a year in 2004 to about 16 percent in 2024, even while the relative gap has not closed. Western immigrants and descendants sit far closer to the Danish-origin baseline; Rockwool Foundation work also finds men with Southeast Asian backgrounds near native rates, while MENAPT-background men remain well above them even after socioeconomic controls. The Danish figures say that, after age is held constant, male descendants of non-Western immigrants, and especially some national-origin subsets, are convicted of violent and Penal Code offences at two to four times the male average, and that this over-representation is larger for descendants than for the immigrant generation itself.
That leaves an empirical hole in the Australian debate. If we want to know whether sexual or violent offending is distributed evenly across different cultural and migration backgrounds, we should collect the information necessary to answer the question rather than assuming the answer in advance. The result might support one political position, another political position or neither. That is what data are for.
So here is the question to put to the people running this campaign. They have spent a decade arguing that culture determines how men treat women, that boys are formed by their environment, that attitudes are learned and that patriarchal norms are transmitted socially. You cannot maintain that Australian boys are powerfully shaped by their cultural environment while simultaneously treating the cultural backgrounds of migrants as irrelevant. Either culture does significant work or it does not.
If coercive control and attitudes towards women are substantially cultural and learned, which is precisely what many of these activists argue, then the culture of the source country is potentially relevant. Societies demonstrably differ in attitudes towards female autonomy, sexuality, marriage, family authority and relations between men and women. Large-scale migration therefore changes not merely the number of people in a society but, potentially, the distribution of cultural attitudes within it. Whether and how rapidly those attitudes change after migration is an empirical question, not something that can simply be assumed away.
The same political coalition that talks endlessly about patriarchy, coercive control and rape culture is also generally strongly supportive of high immigration and resistant to using immigration policy as an instrument of cultural selection. The tension between these positions deserves examination. If culture is sufficiently powerful to justify programmes designed to reshape the attitudes of Australian schoolboys, culture cannot suddenly become irrelevant when discussing immigration.
At minimum, two things should follow. Australia should routinely publish sufficiently detailed offending statistics to permit population-adjusted comparisons by birthplace and migration background, subject to appropriate privacy protections and statistical safeguards, as countries such as Denmark already do. Immigration selection should also be open to discussion as one of the policy mechanisms through which the cultural composition of a society can be influenced. Neither proposition dictates what the eventual empirical result must be. They merely insist that politically uncomfortable hypotheses should be testable rather than rendered statistically invisible.
Young men looking for status, fitness, dating advice and explanations for their frustrations will continue finding blunt talk online, and some of it will undoubtedly be ugly. That is not the same thing as demonstrating a mass conversion of ordinary Australian males into a "rape culture," and repetition by the ABC or academics cannot substitute for evidence. The political divergence between young Western men and women is real, but it cannot accurately be described simply as young men becoming extremists. The demographic composition of support for figures such as Andrew Tate is also more complicated than the familiar stereotype of the alienated young White male suggests.
Likewise, where countries actually measure crime by migration background, significant differences between population groups can appear. That does not establish what the equivalent Australian figures would show; indeed, that is precisely the problem. Until Australia collects and routinely publishes sufficiently detailed data, strong assertions in either direction exceed what the evidence can establish.
The Australian boy should therefore not become the predetermined answer to a question that has not been adequately investigated. If misogyny, violence and coercive behaviour are genuinely matters of urgent public concern, then the evidence should be followed wherever it leads, whether towards social media, schools, families, particular subcultures, socioeconomic conditions, migration backgrounds or some combination of them.
The alternative is not social science but political theatre: define the culprit in advance, collect the statistics that illuminate him, decline to collect the statistics that might complicate the story, and then cite the resulting picture as evidence that the original assumption was correct. The present manosphere panic increasingly risks becoming exactly that.