Crimes against Women in the News, 2019–2026: Attention, Geography and Tone of Global Coverage, and How It Compares with Research

We measure how crimes against women were covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 403,021 de-duplicated articles, and set that coverage beside 31,739 research papers published between 2015 and 2025. All results describe attention in the news, not the incidence of crime. Six results stand out: Falling share. The topic took 42.9 of every 10,000 news articles in 2019 and 22.17 in 2025, a 48.32% smaller share. Raw counts rose because the index grew. Peaks. The share fell 43.45% from 2019 to 2020. The highest monthly share was December 2019, at 72.2 per 10,000. The largest monthly count was August 2024, at 10,402 articles. Geography. India is the largest source of located coverage (33.87%), 2.57 times its share of all news. The United States (32.67%) is under-represented at 0.68. Romania (11.13), India, Bangladesh (2.14) and France (2.0) are the most over-represented countries. Within India, West Bengal (6.8) leads by far; within the United States, New York (2.09). Shifting attention. From 2023 to 2025 the topic's share of national news rose 2.83 times in Bangladesh and 9.08 times in Norway, and fell to 0.37 times its earlier level in Ireland. Tone and urgency. 93.8% of articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 92.5% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Research. Papers on the topic rose from 3.49 to 4.97 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025, a 1.42-fold rise in share, while news share fell.