Broken lives: Why Kenya’s protection against GBV is failing despite 2026 deadline

“Would we please not talk about it!”

The plea is poignant. It comes from Salama*, a student leader at a university in western Kenya who endured a wave of digital torment while campaigning for the vice-chairperson position in the student leadership association last year.

“I would go to bed desperate for rest after a punishing day on the campaign trail, only to wake up to torrents of messages from peers showing digitally altered images of me in sexual poses,” she whispers, her voice tight with the sting of a fresh wound.

“How does someone even do something like that? Do they care what happens after they post such fake photos?” she asks.

Sharing such manipulated images is not merely malicious disinformation designed to destroy a person’s character; it is a form of technologically facilitated gender-based violence (GBV), commonly referred to as digital or online violence. It is labelled gender-based because the abuse is disproportionately directed at women, whose experiences online tend to be far more severe and more frequent than those of men.

Behind the numbers

Although studies on digital violence against men remain limited, the Economist Intelligence Unit reported in 2021 that 38 per cent of women have personally experienced online abuse, while 85 per cent have witnessed it happening to other women.

A 2024 joint study on digital violence in Kenya’s higher learning institutions, conducted by the Collaborative Center for Gender and Development and the University of Nairobi Women’s Economic Empowerment Hub, shows that 35.5 per cent of male students have experienced at least one form of online violence.

Behind these numbers are survivors like Salama, who have faced the full force of this rapidly evolving form of abuse—one that has deepened over the past decade and worsened with the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI), which enables people to create images so sophisticated that they are difficult to detect without close scrutiny.

The Internet Governance Forum lists infringement of privacy, surveillance, monitoring, and reputational damage as acts constituting digital violence. These include harassment, which may occur alongside offline attacks, direct threats, and targeted assaults on individuals or communities.

Using sexist or gendered comments, sharing indecent images to demean women, or abusing a woman for expressing views that challenge social norms—all are recognised forms of harassment.

What manifests in online spaces is merely an extension of normalised violence experienced in homes, workplaces, schools, markets, public transport, and even at water points where men and women compete for scarce resources. The Institute of Development Studies’ 2021 report on global evidence of the prevalence and impact o