Anti-GBV banners are displayed ahead of the flagging off of cars for a digital campaign at the Teleposta Huduma Centre along Kenyatta Avenue, Nairobi,on June 9, 2025.
A Kenya Defence Forces officer goes home after an argument and stabs his wife. That fact alone should hold the entire conversation in place, because it brings together the state, power, trust, and violence in a way that is difficult to ignore. Instead, it becomes just another entry in a growing list of cases that briefly shock the public before being absorbed into silence.
In Kisumu, a 21-year-old student from Ramogi Institute is found dead in the bushes. In Karatina, another woman is killed. The names and locations change, but the structure behind each story remains the same, a man, a woman, violence that escalates behind closed doors, and a society that struggles to stay focused on the person who commits the act.
Data from Odipodev shows that a significant number of women killed in Kenya die at the hands of men they know, often intimate partners or men within their immediate circles of trust. In cases involving firearms, a troubling pattern appears, with police officers and military personnel frequently implicated.
These are men trained, licensed, and empowered by the state to handle force, yet that same force appears again in private spaces where it was never meant to be used.
That overlap between authority and intimacy is where the story becomes more disturbing, because it suggests that the problem is not only individual but structural, tied to how power is taught, carried, and sometimes misused once it leaves public view.
Violence
Yet when these killings are reported, the conversation rarely stays there. It moves quickly away from the man who carried out the violence and settles instead on everything surrounding him.
The relationship is analysed, the argument is reconstructed, and the woman’s life is placed under scrutiny in a way that feels both familiar and deeply unequal. What she did, where she was, why she stayed, all of it becomes material for public judgment, while the perpetrator gradually slips out of focus.
That shift reflects a pattern of cultural comfort with deflection, a preference for examining the victim’s life rather than confronting the actions of the man who ended it.
What gets lost in that process is the continuity of behaviour that often precedes these killings. Control that is mistaken for love, jealousy that is excused as care, isolation that is framed as protection. By the time violence becomes visible, it is rarely the beginning of the pattern. It is the end of a long sequence that was often visible but not addressed.
This is why each case feels both sudden and familiar at the same time. It is not the first warning sign. It is the final one.
The response, however, tends to treat each incident as isolated, disconnected from the others. Public debate expands into general conversations about violence in society, or shifts toward balancing suffering across genders, or avoids naming the specific dynamic at play. In that widening of the discussion, the man at the centre of the act becomes less visible, and with that, the urgency to confront his actions also weakens.
At the institutional level, the gaps remain consistent. Reports of domestic violence are frequently treated as private disputes rather than escalating threats. Protection mechanisms exist but are uneven in practice. Survivors often face systems that respond slowly, if at all, while families are left to carry the aftermath alone.
In the midst of this, women continue to adjust their lives around the possibility of harm. Movement, relationships, communication, and even tone become something carefully managed in environments where unpredictability has become normalised.
Domestic violence
There are men who have challenged this pattern openly. Bunge la Mwananchi has been among those speaking against both political and domestic violence, insisting that accountability must include men speaking to other men rather than leaving the burden solely on women.
Still, the dominant response remains avoidance. A discomfort with centring men in conversations about violence against women. A tendency to redirect, generalise, or dilute.
Because the question that keeps emerging from every case is not complicated. It is direct. What kind of society continues producing the same outcome and still struggles to name where it comes from?
The answer lies in how violence is understood, how masculinity is shaped, and how accountability is distributed or avoided.
Until those patterns are confronted directly, the stories will continue to arrive with the same structure, another man, another woman, another moment of violence that is quickly explained, quickly reframed, and then slowly forgotten.
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This write is a journalist and a human rights defender. [email protected]
