The Silence Gap: Violence Against Women Remains Critically Undercovered in Global Media
A new report shows that media coverage of violence against women has fallen to a decade low, despite a rise in reported cases.
Media coverage of harassment fueled by misogyny as well as violence against women has remained limited in recent years, despite a rise in reported cases, according to a large-scale analysis of more than one billion news stories.
The research, conducted by the international audience strategy consultancy AKAS, found that reporting on sexual misconduct and gender-based violence accounted for a small share of overall news output between 2017 and 2025. Coverage made up just 1.6% of online news during that period, falling to a decade low of 1.3% in 2025.
This relative lack of attention comes even as high-profile cases of abuse — such as those involving the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — have drawn global scrutiny and as the prevalence of violence against women and girls remains high.
Global data from the World Health Organization shows that nearly one in three women — or around 840 million women worldwide — have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, with little change in prevalence over the past two decades.
Between 2017 to 2025, the AKAS study found a sharp increase in coverage of the term “gender ideology.” The term is broadly defined as positing that gender is a social construct disconnected from biological sex, and it is widely used by opponents of gender equality. Mentions of the term rose 42-fold between 2020 and 2025.
The analysis also suggests that men’s voices continue to dominate reporting on these issues of violence and misogyny. On average, men were quoted 1.5 times more frequently than women in stories about misogyny-related topics.
At the country level, researchers found little correlation between the prevalence of violence against women and the amount of media coverage it receives. In some cases, countries with relatively high levels of gender equality — including those in the Nordic region — report comparatively high rates of sexual violence, a phenomenon often described as the “Nordic paradox.” However, the study notes that this paradox is rarely reflected in media coverage in those countries.
When media outlets do cover violence against women, they rarely do so in a way that reflects its systemic nature. The report found that the misogyny-related articles most frequently shared globally “exposed a pronounced focus on individual incidents,” often including “unnecessary sensationalist details,” rather than the broader prevalence of the problem.
Coverage also rarely centered survivors or victims, or explored the structural drivers of violence and harassment — including potential solutions, the report found.
One example cited by AKAS is coverage of crimes committed by Jeffrey Epstein. “Content analysis of almost a million Epstein-related articles published since 2017 showed a significant skew towards story angles that focus on power networks and money rather than the victims’ misogyny-based suffering or explanations of the unresolved root causes that have made the Epstein network’s decades-long abuse of girls and women possible,” the report states.
Terms such as “systemic,” “sexism,” “patriarchy,” and “misogyny” appeared in less than 1% of Epstein-related coverage, according to the analysis. The term “structural” appeared in just 0.5% of articles, while the phrase “violence against women” featured in only 0.1%.
📺 You can watch a video of Luba Kassova, co-founder of AKAS, discussing this research with Angelina Kariakina (Public Interest Journalism Lab), Tracy McVeigh (The Guardian) and The Persistent's Francesca Donner.
