If you are a woman who has been raped, sexually harassed or assaulted, the past few weeks may not have been the easiest. The victims’ stories that have been dominating the news cycle have been deeply affecting, reminding women of their own experiences in perhaps unexpected ways. Take a recent conversation: “I don’t think I’ve ever been sexually harassed at work,” a friend mused. “Well, there was that time my older boss locked us in his car, started driving us to a deserted part of town known for sex, and wouldn’t let me out.”

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As high-profile women share their abuse stories publicly, we have been reminded that so many of us have a “well, there was that time”. An incident that we have lived with, simmering and shameful, only for it to emerge in a burst of anger or, just as common, a kind of weary acceptance and sadness at the tedious inevitability of it all.

But even more exhausting and fury-inducing has been the tone of the media coverage itself. From having to switch John Humphrys off, because he is using BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to suggest that this whole thing is a “witch hunt” that will make men too afraid to ask women out on dates, to Giles Coren whining that “office sex” isn’t what it used to be, to an edition of Moral Maze focusing on the “complicity” of victims, much of the journalism examining these sexual abuse and harassment scandals has been minimising and undermining: a disgrace.

Kate Maltby, who told of an encounter with the Tory MP Damien Green, a family friend who had known her since she was a child, has been brutally trashed. The Mail produced a double-page piece with the headline ONE VERY PUSHY LADY, in an attempt to discredit her, characterising her as slutty (she once wore shorts) and “desperate to be noticed”, “making a big fuss over nothing”. A photograph of her wearing a corset appeared alongside.

Maltby’s crime? Explaining that Green’s behaviour – he put his hand on her knee, saying that his wife was “very understanding” – made her feel uncomfortable. She was not calling him a rapist. She merely explained that abuse of power happens on a continuum, and that her experience was an example of that predatory sense of entitlement that many of us know so well.

Perhaps, if male readers still don’t get it, imagine an old friend 30 years senior to your daughter taking her out to offer career advice, only to sexually proposition her. Maybe it makes your skin crawl as much as it did Maltby’s. If it doesn’t, you are the one with the problem.

It's such a betrayal, this cynical conflation of sexual assault with flirtation for the purposes of column inches

Young women are so often seen and not heard. We don’t usually have newspaper columns, and aren’t in charge of flagship current affairs programmes, so our stories often go untold. We are also the group most likely to be victims of sexual assault and harassment. And so our silence is convenient for the men who treat us like meat. Now we are speaking out, it is imperative that we be smacked down. At a time when many young women are no doubt still trying to muster up the courage to report or tell their stories, this coverage is dangerous. And people wonder why victims don’t come forward. An article in the Times claiming “millennial women are too quick to shame men” isn’t exactly helping. Not to mention Sarah Vine’s entire splenetic, victim-blaming output.

Because it’s not just powerful men who are pouring scorn on victims: it’s older women, too. Another friend summed these kinds of “quit whining” articles up thus: “I worked in a newsroom with 800 perverts and I coped, so why shouldn’t you?”

It all feels like such a betrayal, this deliberate and cynical conflation of sexual assault with flirtation for the purposes of column inches. Anyone with half a brain knows that this isn’t what we’re talking about. But so rarely does anyone take the time to listen to us. Instead, in a joke of a programme worthy of Chris Morris, Newsnight producers decided we needed to hear from a panel of 14 men making comparisons with the animal kingdom and complaining that you can’t even put your arm around a woman these days.

Eliza Anyangwe was one of the guests. “We were stunned. I had been invited on the premise that we’d be having a serious conversation about relationships between men and women and the dynamics of power,” she said, describing the debate as a “wasted opportunity”.

Laura Bates, another member of the panel, agreed. “Over and over again, the media has diminished the issue of systemic abuse, which impacts on thousands of women’s lives and careers, by deliberately and disingenuously conflating it with flirting and compliments. It encourages audiences to dismiss women’s accounts, discourages victims from reporting, and does nothing to move the conversation forward. It also suggests all men are harassers, which is insulting and lets off the hook the small number of men who are very deliberately abusing their power to assault women.”

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If Newsnight’s producers really thought these scandals were about such minor infractions as elbow-touching, why did they start their programme with footage of three women describing rape, sexual assault, and a particularly horrific example of domestic violence, respectively? To have your rape juxtaposed with the courting rituals of elephants and comments about touching women’s arms is profoundly insulting. How must those victims feel?

What should be a golden opportunity to shine a light on sexist abuse has seen the media failing victims, blaming and belittling them instead of holding perpetrators to account. Bates describes it as the most depressing few weeks of her career. I agree. How far we still have to go, how urgently we need to hear young women speak out. Give them a voice, not the dinosaurs who doubt them.

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist. She co-founded The Vagenda blog, and is co-author of The Vagenda: A Zero Tolerance Guide to the Media