A 'first of its kind' report, The Global Misogyny News Coverage Tracker by research consultancy AKAS offers a sobering audit of how the world’s media — including the UK — covers violence and harassment against women.

Despite a decade marked by high-profile abuse scandals and a surge in digital misogyny – not least the release of the long-anticipated Epstein Files – the study finds that newsrooms are consistently failing to reflect the scale and complexity of the crisis.

Key data points:

  • In 2025, just 1.3 per cent of global online news coverage addressed misogynistic harassment or violence — the lowest in nine years.
  • From 2017–2025, coverage averaged only 1.6 per cent of all online news, even as real-world violence against women remained endemic and, in some regions, escalated.
  • References to "gender ideology" — a term weaponised by anti-gender equality movements — rose 42-fold globally (and 79-fold in North America) between 2020 and 2025.
  • Men outnumber women by 1.5 to 1 as quoted sources in misogyny-related stories; survivors’ voices are largely absent.
  • There is no meaningful correlation between the prevalence of violence in a country and the amount of news coverage it receives.

Meanwhile, Google Trends data shows searches for “domestic abuse support” quadrupled in the UK between 2017 and 2025. In December 2025, the UK government declared violence against women a national emergency, yet media coverage did not rise in step. The report illustrates the problem:

1 in 9 women worldwide has experienced violence at the hands of a man in the last 12 months. 1 in 3 women has been sexually violated in her lifetime. Yet the global news media continues to treat this as a peripheral story. When coverage does appear, it is too often shaped by sensationalist incident-reporting, focused on the perpetrator rather than the survivor, and stripped of the structural context that would help audiences understand — and ultimately challenge — the deep-rooted forces that make such violence so widespread.