While anti-gender rhetoric rises, news coverage of misogyny has hit a decade low. AKAS release inaugural groundbreaking “Global Misogyny Coverage Tracker”, bringing the attention on the urgent need of a survivor-centric reporting.
When a woman is abused, how do we make sure we tell her story through a lens that won’t affect her dignity and reignite trauma and pain? How, as journalists, can we prioritize a survivor-centric approach and a female perspective to avoid perpetuating—through our storytelling—the very abuse these women were forced to endure, or risking the complete erasure of gender-based violence and women’s suffering from mainstream media?
The answer lies in a startling new mirror held up to our industry. On April 18th, the audience-strategy consultancy AKAS launched the inaugural “Global Misogyny Coverage Tracker” authored by Luba Kassova and lead analyst, Richard Addy. Analyzing over 1.14 billion online news stories published globally between 2017 and 2025, the research uncovers a devastating reality: while violence against women and girls (VAWG) remains endemic, the media’s attention is fading into a whisper.
The report was presented at the International Journalism Festival during the panel “Rewriting her story”, where researcher, journalist, and co-founder of AKAS, Luba Kassova, shared the findings of the 7th report in the Missing Perspectives series posing a vital question: “How can news coverage fight, not fuel, violence against women?”
The panel included diverse voices from the industry: Francesca Donner, founder and editor-in-chief of The Persistent; Angelina Kariakina, co-founder of the Public Interest Journalism Lab; and Tracy McVeigh, editor of foundations and philanthropic projects at The Guardian. Together, they helped us understand what a path forward looks like, for news coverage that is more likely to lead to positive change for survivors and societies alike.
We are living in an era where AI-assisted sexual violence is skyrocketing, attacking women and children, and high-profile predators are proliferating. Yet, the report reveals a “stark disconnect”. Between 2017 and 2025, misogyny-related coverage averaged a measly 1.6% of total news output. By 2025, this figure plummeted to a decade low of just 1.3%.
As coverage of women’s lived realities declines, a louder, more clinical voice is taking its place. Between 2020 and 2025, references to “gender ideology”, a term frequently weaponised by global anti-gender movements to undermine equality, increased by 42 times. The reality these numbers reveal is that we are witnessing a world where the vocabulary of the perpetrator is growing faster than the testimony of the survivor. Where naming things for what they are — is this not the primary job of a journalist? — is no longer standard practice.
In the coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein files, for instance, essential terms like “misogyny,” “patriarchy,” or “systemic sexism” appeared in less than 1% of 808K global news articles (part of the 1.14 billion online news stories analysed). Instead, for many of the world’s largest English-speaking publications, the priority shifted toward narratives built on disguise and distraction, focusing on power networks and sensationalist details while the phrase “violence against women” was present in a mere 0.1% of stories. The media treated the story as a thriller about power networks and the financial elite, essentially sanitising the systemic misogyny that allowed the abuse to happen. If we fail to name the system, we fail to dismantle it. As journalists, we are the ones who give names to things. If we don’t call it ‘systemic misogyny,’ we are essentially helping the perpetrator hide behind vague language. We have to be brave enough to use the right words even when they are uncomfortable.
The analysis exposed that this meager coverage is also distinctly uneven. Over half of the articles referencing the structural disadvantages women face (51%) are concentrated into just five news websites: the BBC, The Guardian, Substack, Indiatimes, and Yahoo News. These outlets represent a mere 10% of the top 50 news providers. It is particularly telling that Substack—a platform enabling journalists to build independent media businesses—has broken into the top three. Disillusioned with legacy media layoffs and shrinking budgets, reporters are pivoting to Substack for creative freedom and direct reader relationships. As of October 2025, the platform boasted over 500,000 active creators, many of whom are filling the narrative gaps left by traditional newsrooms.
This qualitative shift in language is not merely an academic concern; it has devastating consequences for how survivors are perceived and how justice is pursued. According to the report’s deep dive into the most hyperlinked-to misogyny stories globally, our industry is currently trapped in a cycle of sensationalism. The analysis reveals that newsrooms frequently prioritize “painfully indigestible” sensationalist details of individual crimes while keeping the language regarding perpetrators curiously abstract. By focusing on the graphic “what” of an incident rather than the endemic “why,” we risk turning a survivor’s trauma into a spectacle for public consumption rather than a catalyst for societal reform.
Perhaps the most painful paradox highlighted by the tracker is that even when the news does cover misogyny, it often filters it through a male lens. In 2025, 1.5 men were quoted for every one woman in articles about misogyny. Data from the tracker further clarifies this hierarchy of voice: when gender-based violence (GBV) is the topic, men are positioned as the “experts” and “voices of authority,” while women are relegated to “eyewitnesses” or “victims”. Nearly half of the articles analysed—45%—did not quote a single woman.
The need and reason for such a report lies in the impact that media can create. As lead author Luba Kassova writes, “We took the decision to invest our resources in launching a tracker and producing this report driven by an awareness of the catalytic role that news can play in making positive change happen“. At a time when funds for gender and inclusion are being cut globally, this report stands as a magnificent act of hope and resilience.
Violence against women and girls, online and offline, is reaching epidemic levels. As members of the media, we have a profound responsibility to report on this crisis in a way that is ethical and centred on survivors; if we are not doing that, we are failing our audience and the mission of journalism itself. We can’t be passive observers of this statistical decline, we simply can’t afford that anymore.
The Global Misogyny News Coverage Tracker offers a path forward, but two fundamental shifts are non-negotiable for any newsroom seeking to advance gender-just reporting. The first shift begins with dismantling the “outlier” narrative that frames perpetrators as “monsters” or “beasts”—a linguistic choice that creates a dangerous illusion of exceptionalism. When we use this language, we tell our audience that these men are anomalies, rare predators outside the bounds of “civilized” society. The data suggests otherwise. True journalistic integrity requires our reporting to acknowledge how violence is often perpetrated by “average” men within a broader, systemic framework.
The second catalyst for change is the reclamation of the active voice. For too long, newsrooms have opted for the distancing, passive “a woman was raped”—a construction that erases the actor and centres the trauma on the victim. We must instead use precise, empathetic language that identifies the perpetrator and the act. This is not just a grammatical choice; it is a moral one. It firmly places the burden of accountability on the aggressor rather than casting a shadow of shame on the survivor.
These tools are part of a broader, more comprehensive checklist within the AKAS report designed to move journalism from incident-based to “impact-based” storytelling. In the conclusion of the report, Luba Kassova leaves us with a hopeful message for the year ahead: “I look forward to writing the second iteration of this report in a year’s time in the hope that it will show an improvement in misogyny-related coverage… Newsrooms and journalists globally hold a precious key. The key to the perspectives of hundreds of millions of women and girls who are suffering and whose stories demand to be told with sensitivity and skill to move policymakers“.
We have the evidence. We have the data. And now, we have the tools to ensure that when we tell her story, we finally do it right.
You can read and dowload the report here.
