Your enemy is closer than you think. For many Kenyan women, the person who demands a phone password, reads private messages and tracks their movements through a screen is not a faceless troll. He is the man they live with, or the one they used to.
That is the uncomfortable picture painted by the recently released 2025–2626 Kenya Mini Demographic and Health Survey (KMDHS), which measured technology-facilitated gender-based violence, abuse committed, assisted, aggravated or amplified through digital tools.
The most common form of abuse is online control, reported by 19 per cent of women, followed by hacking at 5 per cent and online sexual harassment or cyber sexual abuse at 3 per cent. Most of it happens on platforms women use every day.
“Sixty-seven per cent of women who experienced digital gender violence say it happened on social media, with Facebook cited by 59 per cent. Messaging apps follow at 47 per cent, with WhatsApp at 26 per cent. Among girls aged 15–19, 77 per cent reported abuse on social media.”
The report shows how widespread the abuse is. “Twenty-six percent of women age 15–49 have ever experienced technology-facilitated violence from any perpetrator,” the report says, and 21 per cent experienced it often or sometimes in the 12 months before the survey.
