When Tate first arrived in Romania six years ago, aged 30, he was asked why he chose to relocate. “I like eastern Europe as a whole,” he said, “because corruption is far more accessible.” In the UK, he mused, only those of high status get away with crimes, implying that Romania was open to all.

Romania’s anti-organised crime agency, known as Diicot, said the seven alleged victims were recruited with false declarations of love and taken to Romania’s Ilfov county, where they were forced to take part in pornography. The women were allegedly controlled by “intimidation, constant surveillance” and claims they were in debt, prosecutors said. As well as training for teachers, schools are also bringing in teams from organisations such as Beyond Equality, School of Sexuality Education, Hope Not Hate, Everyone’s Invited and Bold Voices to work with pupils on gender equality, gender-based violence and misogyny. The assistant head of a secondary school in south-east England asked the charity to talk to her pupils after disciplining a male student for harassing a girl by sending her a barrage of threatening and explicit sexual messages, on one occasion while standing outside her house. Last week, however, content being promoted to users on the platform appeared to be in flagrant breach of the rules.

She is frustrated that officials at the Department for Education (DfE) have been advising heads who reach out for help not to encourage discussion of Tate’s views in personal, social and health education (PSHE) lessons, and are refusing to offer any training or resources. Undermining the protestations of his vast global fanbase (Tate fans took to the streets in Athens to protest his innocence) and doing little to help Tate’s defence are the bizarrely self-incriminating social media lectures that he has made over the years. Possibly useful when trying to burnish his gangster credentials for a credulous online audience, but less so when faced with a real-world Romanian prosecutor trying to prove you are involved in organised crime. Another said: “From September he’s just accelerated from nowhere to become a primary issue for schools that I have been dealing with. He obviously doesn’t fit within the Prevent sphere but incels do. He is parallel to them and has a crossover. When I’m in schools I find myself describing him, effectively, as toxic misogyny on steroids.

Pushing through the gears, he then complained about how rape allegations in the UK were pursued a little too vigorously for his tastes – perhaps a reference to his own experience. “In western legal systems,” he said, “whether England, America, or any of them, if a girl says something she needs zero proof … and they will come and arrest you. It’s insanity and I thought, I can’t live under this system any more, so I had to move somewhere with common-sense rules.” Manufacturing times for this option vary more around busier times of the year or during extreme circumstances such as covid-19 shutdowns. I'm doing you the favor as legacy media, giving you relevance by speaking to you. And I'm telling you now, this Sophie, which the BBC has invented, which has no face, nobody knows who she is..." he said. Tate’s conversion might be a stunt, but what it has done is feed into that kind of unclear and very messy ideological aspect that is now affecting a larger cohort of pupils in schools. Not only do you now have, for example, white kids who were drawn to him before but now you now have young English Muslims too,” said one of the Prevent workers.

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Frontline practitioners delivering the government’s counter-extremism Prevent programme told the Guardian that he was a factor in cases dating into last year.