Media coverage of violence against women and girls and misogynistic harassment is at a “pitiful” low, despite a proliferation of high-profile cases of men abusing women and children, and a rise in AI-assisted violence against women and girls, new research shows.

An analysis of 1.14bn online stories published worldwide between 2017 and 2025 found that the proportion of articles that include terms relating to misogynistic abuse dropped to a “dismal” 1.3% of all global online news in 2025, the lowest level in that period. Coverage peaked at 2.2% in 2018, the height of the #MeToo movement. In Africa, where multiple conflicts have involved extreme levels of sexual violence, coverage sank to a nine-year low of 1.18% in 2024.

“It is shocking, particularly considering the scale of the problem and the ways in which violence against women and misogyny have been weaponised by authoritarian actors as part of the rollback of rights,” said Prof Julie Posetti, the chair of the Centre for Journalism and Democracy at City St George’s, University of London. “It signals a failure by the press … how little progress we’ve made and how far we have to go.”

The first global report of its kind, to which the Guardian was given exclusive access before its launch on 18 April, analysed Jeffery Epstein-related coverage from 2017 to February 2026. Out of nearly 1m Epstein-related articles, the term “violence against women” was present in a mere 0.1% of them, while 25% mentioned “victims” and 26% referenced “power”, “money”, “elites” or “corruption”.

The analysis also identified a failure to address the structural nature of misogyny that enables abuse through long-standing prejudices and power imbalances.

Luba Kassova, lead author of the report, said: “What we concluded by doing this analysis is that the gender-inequality lens is all but missing from coverage of the Epstein story. This means that news coverage does not get to the root causes of the problem.”

The high incidence of sexual violence in many countries is not matched by higher levels of news coverage, and the decline in coverage is overlooking, or at worst ignoring, a profound and desperate need among its audiences, the report said.

One in nine women worldwide have experienced violence from men in the last 12 months and one in three women have been subject to physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. Because admitting to having been sexually abused is difficult and taboo, the reality is probably much worse.

As the world becomes increasingly digital, the spaces and methods for perpetrating gender-based violence are expanding and proliferating at an alarming rate. Millions of women and girls are affected by online violence every year, with research suggesting that up to 60% of women around the world have experienced this type of gendered abuse.

When misogyny-related stories are covered, men’s perspectives and opinions dominate. The research found that 1.5 men are quoted for every one woman in stories about misogyny – a gap that is growing.

Sarah Macharia, from the Global Media Monitoring Project, the largest and longest longitudinal study on gender in the world’s media, has researched this aspect of coverage of violence against women. She said: “These stories hardly ever appear and when they do, we have seen that it is a male voice that prevails. We found that of the experts quoted in stories [about gender-based violence], 24% were men compared with 17% women.”

She added: “It is dismal in various respects – in terms of who speaks in the stories as well as the narratives that continue to sexualise and objectify girls and women who are survivors of this atrocity.”

To understand the level of misogyny-related coverage in online news, researchers selected 12 misogyny-related terms such as sexual violence, femicide and rape. While levels of coverage that mentioned any of the terms declined, references to “gender ideology” – a contested term dating back to the 1990s and pushed by the global anti-gender equality movement – soared by a factor of 42 between 2020 and 2025. This was largely driven by US media.

Macharia first started hearing about the impact of the term “gender ideology” in Latin America in about 2010. “[It was] being used to normalise and spread misogyny. We’ve seen political rhetoric that undermines women and trivialises them. We see this in leadership in certain quarters and when that happens, it seems to spread like a contagion.”

The report recommended solutions to improving coverage of violence against women and girls. Among them was the suggestion to put female journalists and editors in charge of shaping coverage, and victims and survivors of violence at the heart of the story.

When reporting on high-profile cases of men who have perpetrated the serial abuse of women and girls, publications should offer explanations, uncovering the root causes of the problem by exposing the gender inequality that contributes to abuse of power, patriarchal norms and misogynistic culture, the report said.

Posetti, who led a study for UN Women on the escalating crisis of online violence against women in public life, recognised that there were some pockets of excellence and specific initiatives within the media looking at violence against women, but said wide-scale change was needed. “It continues to alarm and confound me that we have not been able to shift the discourse and norms more effectively,” she said. “Until the mainstream press is fully equipped and willing to shift these norms, we’re not going to change anything.”