The Human Rights Crisis the Headlines Ignore

This is the second of a two-part post that forms a call to action to feminists; anti-sexual violence and anti-incest activists; social justice activists; anti-sexists; sexual violence prevention advocates; and all who are simply fed up with with our culture’s indifference to sexual violence against girls and women, and with the patriarchal system that permits it.

In the first part of this blog post, I highlighted the recent rise in global sexual violence against women and girls(VAWG) during the past two years.

As noted in Part 1, across the world, violence against women and girls (VAWG) is one of the most serious—and the most tolerated—human rights violations. Yet this growing epidemic of sexual, gender-based violence is still largely invisible in mainstream media coverage, overshadowed by the traditional topics—politics, business, and sports—that dominate the media cycle. This persistent underreporting is not a failure of journalism alone. Rather, a range of interrelated dynamics—including patriarchal gatekeeping—helps sustain this suppression. I’ll highlight just three here.

Systemic bias: Gender inequality is a deeply entrenched structural part of society, and decisions about what counts as “hard news” follow sexist power hierarchies that have existed since the beginning of Western civilization. Given these prejudices, violence against women and girls is typically coded as “social” or “human interest,” a sidebar to the “real” story—that being the overwhelmingly white men’s narrative of geopolitics and governance. As a result, media coverage of violence against women and girls is woefully inadequate and typically depoliticized, framed as isolated incidents—each dismissed as a one-off—rather than recognized as part of the continuum of systemic injustices that include racism, antisemitism, and other structural forms of oppression. The absence of critical social context distorts the public’s understanding and minimizes the severity of the issue.

Backlash to progress: While violence against women and children has millennia-old historical roots, the past decade—particularly since 2016—as seen a sharp rise in coordinated, aggressive efforts to roll back hard-won gains. This anti-feminist backlash includes extremist masculinist regimes systematically dismantling gender-responsive policies and silencing women’s rights organizations, including those working to prevent sexual abuse and violence against women and girls.

Past success narrative: Previous victories, such as women’s suffrage and the passage of gender equality laws in the early 20^th century, have fostered  the false perception that the fight against sexual violence against women and girls is no longer necessary. This misconception obscures the daily realities of women’s oppression by framing gender-based violence as something “expected” rather than urgent and newsworthy. Mainstream media reinforces this illusion by downplaying and normalizing violence against women and girls, entrenching discriminatory norms that keep the issue off the public agenda. As a result, systemic solutions remain overlooked, and women’s experiences of violence remain largely invisible in both policy and public discourse.

Sexual violence against women and girls is not an isolated tragedy. It is a structural injustice rooted in hierarchical masculinist ideologies that have shaped our political, social, and cultural life for thousands of years. As I argue in my forthcoming book, She’s Such a Liar: Incest, Knowledge & Power — A Manifesto, it is the politics of power, gender, and fear that allow this violence to continue unchecked. What we’re seeing is by design: a masculinist global information economy optimized to amplify the voices, priorities, and narratives of those in power while marginalizing the experiences and rights of women and girls, rendering their suffering invisible or unimportant.

Until the media covers violence against women and girls, acknowledges its structural roots, and interrogates the masculinist institutions that perpetuate it, our understanding of the world remains profoundly incomplete.

The challenge, then, is not simply to report more cases, but to report sexual violence differently and ask different questions. For example, who benefits from this silence? How do societal institutions and mechanisms beyond journalism—legal, cultural, and economic—perpetuate and enforce systemic gendered violence as an invisible norm? 

If journalism is the first draft of history, the core issue, then, is just this: What kind of history are we writing when the experiences of millions of women and girls are erased from the record?

Image source: PIKWIZARD