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. Among women who have ever had a husband or intimate partner, 27 per cent have experienced it at the hands of a current, most recent or previous partner.

The burden is not spread evenly, the report states that Nairobi City records the highest lifetime experience from any perpetrator at 33 per cent, followed by Murang’a and Baringo at 32 per cent each.

“For abuse by an intimate partner, Homa Bay 36 per cent and Baringo 35 per cent lead, while in the 12 months before the survey Trans Nzoia topped the list at 31 per cent. At the other end, Mandera and Wajir report just 3 per cent, a figure that may say as much about silence as about safety,” the report says

The picture is similar among young people. A 2024 rapid study by the Collaborative Centre for Gender and Development, working with the UNFPA and Women Economic Empowerment, found that nearly 90 per cent of young adults enrolled in three Nairobi tertiary institutions had witnessed TFGBV, and 39 per cent had experienced it personally.

Among women who have ever had a husband or intimate partner, 27 per cent have experienced gender violence committed by a current, most recent or previous partner, and 22 per cent did so in the past year. When women were asked who was responsible, the answer was blunt. Current husbands or intimate partners accounted for 61 per cent of perpetrators, former partners for 22 per cent and strangers for just 13 per cent.

Women who have never been married or had a partner face a different threat. For them, the most common perpetrators are strangers at 45 per cent, online attackers at 23 per cent and friends or acquaintances at 20 per cent.

Warning signs

Control is the common thread. The report describes such behaviours by a male partner as “important early warning signs that may escalate into violence within a relationship.”

 Sixty-one per cent of ever-partnered women say their current or most recent partner has shown at least one controlling behaviour, and 27 per cent report three or more. Half say he has been jealous or angry when they spoke to other men, and 36 per cent say he insists on knowing where they are at all times. Others describe partners who demand passwords or read messages without consent.

Age and marital status matter.  Technology-based gender violence is lowest among girls aged 15–19 at 10 per cent and highest among women aged 20–24 at 37 per cent. Forty-one per cent of divorced, separated or widowed women have experienced it, compared with 27 per cent of married women and 19 per cent of the never married.

Yet the digital rights advocate Cherie Oyier, a programmes officer at the Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet), says the low figures in some places should not be read as safety. Much of the abuse happens where nobody can see it.

“Closed applications, meaning like WhatsApp, those are the ones that most people, intimate partners will usually use,” she says. “Even as you are scrolling the internet to look for these instances, we may not be able to catch it. But it does not mean that it is not happening or that it is at a lower level.”

Culture also silences women. “Most women are told just endure, this is what marriage is about,” Oyier says. “Sometimes they don’t know, it’s so overt, like it doesn’t come out clearly that this is abuse. So most of the times, it is not reported.”

Online, abuse has been turned into entertainment. “It has become banter,” she says. “Even the people who are experiencing it have trivialised it. It’s now ingrained to you, like this is something that happens, you should expect it actually. If you post a picture, one of the things that you are thinking about is what kind of comments am I going to get.”

A 2023 report by KICTANet found that more than 30 per cent of Kenyans have experienced some form of TFGBV, while 90 per cent have witnessed it. In 2025, KICTANet and Equality Now released survivor testimonies showing how deceptive online job offers, grooming and image-based abuse leave women exposed, and how many had never received counselling despite years of trauma.

The stakes are not only digital. The 2025 Report of the Technical Working Group on GBV Including Femicide, cited in the KMDHS, indicated that many cases of homicide of women and girls, and of sexual and physical harm directed towards them, “are preceded by online and offline harassment using digital tools.”

For survivors, the law offers little comfort. “The technology is moving at a very fast pace compared to the laws,” Oyier says. In an attempt to bolster the gaps, Kenya has many fragmented laws. “You’ll have the Data Protection Act, the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, the Children’s Act, that to some extent touch on online issues, but they don’t really cohesively cover the different instances of TFGBV.”

The police, she says, often do not know either. “Just imagine you’re a woman who is in a village, for example, a village in Siaya, and you encounter violence. For you to even understand which law apply is very stressful.”

“You’re going through psychological stress and depression, and you’re also supposed to figure out which law applies in your situation. It causes even more problems for victims and survivors.”

Flagging abusive language

Artificial intelligence is adding a new layer. Even so, Oyier cautions against writing it off. “We should not vilify AI completely,” she says. KICTANet has built a lexicon to help flag abusive language and runs a tracker for online gender-based violence. “One person cannot sit down and look at everything on social media. When AI is able to pull every post that has this word, a human content moderator is able to look through it with local context and see is this TFGBV or not.”

The KMDHS findings further show that exposure to TFGBV varies across age groups and digital platforms.

“Younger women are particularly exposed on social media, with 77 per cent of women aged 15–19 and 72 per cent of those aged 20–24 who experienced TFGBV reporting abuse on social media platforms, compared with 50 per cent of women aged 40–49.”

However, messaging applications tell a different story. Women aged 40–49 reported the highest exposure through these platforms at 54 per cent, compared with 30 per cent among teenagers aged 15–19.

Wealth also influences where women encounter online abuse. Exposure on social media increases from 45 per cent among women in the lowest wealth quintile to 74 per cent among those in the highest. Conversely, women in the lowest wealth quintile report greater exposure through messaging applications, at 62 per cent, compared with 39 per cent among those in the highest wealth quintile.

These differences suggest that TFGBV cuts across age and economic backgrounds, although the platforms through which women experience it vary.