There is a familiar script that plays out whenever violence against women is named clearly. The deflection comes quickly, almost reflexively. Not all men. It is offered as reassurance, as if naming a system requires implicating every individual within it, and as if the scale of harm can somehow be softened by insisting on exceptions.
But the problem with that response is not just that it misses the point. It is that it actively obscures it, what is happening when the scale itself tells a different story.
A recent investigation by CNN exposed online communities where men share images of women who appear unconscious, drugged or asleep, and exchange tactics for how to carry out and conceal abuse. The reporting points to platforms attracting millions of visits, Sixty-two million to be precise . It is a number that resists minimisation, not because it tells us that all men are responsible, but because it makes clear that this is not marginal behaviour. It is organised, it is normalised within those spaces, and it is sustained at a scale that should fundamentally shift how seriously we take it.
At the same time, here in Australia, the data is moving in the wrong direction in ways that should make any claim of progress impossible to sustain. Sexual violence has reached a 31 year high, in what is already one of the most underreported categories of crime, and in 2026 alone at least 16 women have been killed, according to Counting Dead Women Australia. What is perhaps most telling is not only the number itself, but the fact that we rely on an advocacy project to produce it. Despite repeated commitments and national plans, there is still no consistent, official mechanism for counting the number of women killed by gendered violence in this country.
It is difficult to argue that prevention is a priority when we are not even prepared to measure the outcome.
These realities are often treated as separate. Online harm is discussed as a problem of platforms, while violence against women in Australia is framed as a domestic policy challenge. But they are not separate issues and treating them as such allows both to persist without the level of intervention they require. The environments exposed in this investigation do not exist outside of our cultural context. They feed into it, reinforcing the attitudes and behaviours that underpin violence, while also providing a space where that violence is refined, shared and, ultimately, scaled.
This is why the conversation must shift away from individual behaviour and toward systems.
It is more comfortable to locate the problem in individual men, because it allows governments to respond with awareness campaigns, education messaging and calls for cultural change that sit at a distance from structural reform. But the scale we are seeing, both online and in the data here in Australia, points to something else entirely. It points to environments that are being shaped, enabled and, in some cases, protected by policy choices.
Platforms that host and distribute this material operate within regulatory frameworks that governments design and enforce. The fact that content depicting or encouraging sexual violence can circulate at scale is not an accident. It is the outcome of a regulatory approach that has consistently prioritised negotiation over enforcement, and industry cooperation over accountability.
The same pattern is visible domestically. Governments speak with increasing urgency about ending violence against women, yet the policy responses remain heavily weighted toward crisis intervention. Those responses are essential, but they are also downstream, addressing harm after it has occurred rather than disrupting the conditions that produce it.
Systemic prevention requires a different kind of intervention. It requires governments to act upstream, to regulate markets, to impose enforceable standards on industries, and to reshape the environments in which violence is normalised and enabled. It requires a willingness to move beyond statements of intent and into system prevention that carries political and economic consequences.
That is the point at which momentum and energy tends to stall.
Instead, responsibility continues to be pushed back onto individuals, particularly women, who are still told to manage risk, to stay alert and to anticipate harm. Yet there is a limit to what individual vigilance can achieve in the face of systems that are actively refining how that harm is inflicted. You cannot individualise your way out of a structural problem, and you cannot claim progress while the indicators of harm are moving in the wrong direction.
The insistence on not all men allows us to avoid that reckoning, because it shifts the focus away from the systems that enable violence and back onto a debate about individual culpability. But sixty-two million visits to platforms hosting this material tells us that the issue is not whether every man is responsible. It is that enough men are participating to sustain an ecosystem, and that ecosystem is being allowed to exist.
When sexual violence is at a 31 year high, when women are being killed and not formally counted, and when online environments are actively facilitating and scaling abuse, it is no longer credible to suggest that the current approach is working.
If we are serious about system prevention, then we have to be equally serious about the systems that enable harm, both online and offline. That means regulation that is enforceable, not voluntary. It means accountability that extends beyond statements and into consequences. And it means a policy approach that is willing to intervene before violence occurs, rather than continuing to respond after the fact.
Anything less is not a gap in understanding. It is a failure to act.