This is the first 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, feminist journalists, and all who are simply fed up with our culture’s invisibilization of sexual violence against girls and women, and with the patriarchal system that permits it.

During the past two years, sexual violence against women and girls (VAWG) has increased by 25%. 

The data reveal a worldwide pattern:

• Darfur-Sudan conflict 
  Since April 2023, sexual violence against women and girls has escalated dramatically. Girls are routinely raped, gang raped, trafficked, abducted, and used as sex slaves. 
• Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) 
  In 2023, Médecins Sans Frontières reported that it treated 25,166 victims of sexual violence—the highest number ever recorded by the organization in the country. That’s more than two victims per hour, every hour, for an entire year. 
• USA
  The National Sexual Violence Resource Center reports that “One in four girls (24.7 %) is sexually abused before the age of 18.” Recent data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicate that for girls under 12, 47% of perpetrators were family members, most of whom were male. Relatively new forms of sexual violence (including illegal use of generativeAI, sextortion, child sex trafficking facilitated online) have surged.
• Myanmar
  Myanmar’s national armed forces—members of the dominant Bamar Buddhist power structure—have, for decades, hunted, raped, abducted, traded, and murdered girls and women who come from the country’s systematically marginalized, non-dominant ethnic communities. 
• Haiti
  Girls in displacement camps face an unprecedented level of sexual violence. 
• Russia-Ukraine conflict
  UN reports and testimony indicate that sexual violence in Ukraine has been committed against victims between the ages of 12 and 83.

Despite this global and domestic evidence, mainstream news has largely overlooked the epidemic of sexual violence, typically prioritizing the actions of powerful men instead. For example, it’s no secret that since Trump announced his first presidential run, he has dominated mainstream news cycles—especially outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and most of the other major broadcast networks. 

The disparity is clear when we compare evening-news coverage: from January 20 to April 9, 2025, evening-news shows on ABC News, NBC News, and CBS News devoted an astonishing 1,716 minutes of coverage to Trump and his administration’s follies, compared with just 726 minutes for Joe Biden during his first 2+ months.

And the recent flood of Epstein-files coverage doesn’t contradict this pattern. The suffering of his victims is profound and deserves public attention. But the press’s response highlights a deeper dynamic: it will mobilize extraordinary attention for a high-profile scandal involving powerful men while routinely overlooking the far more common, everyday sexual violence experienced by women and girls around the world.

The System Behind the Silence

When considered together, the global accounts of violence against women and girls and the near-total absence of coverage form a stark pattern. What we’re witnessing is not random editorial oversight. It’s a product of interlocking systems of patriarchal power—political, economic, and cultural—that determine which stories are told and whose suffering counts.

The omission of this global epidemic from the news cycle is itself an act of silencing, one that reflects a deeper ideological collusion among institutions invested in maintaining gender hierarchies. This is not a failure of journalism alone; rather it points to a mutually reinforcing system of patriarchal power, an idea I explore in Part 2 of this post, scheduled for publication on January 06, 2026.

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