‘Women’s bodies are the battlefield’: Survivors recount digital misogyny during femicide protests
Human rights defender Rachael Mwikali (centre) accompanied by other activists outside Muthaiga Police Station where they demanded the release of three activists arrested over protests in Nairobi on June 28, 2025.
What you need to know:
- Human rights defender Rachael Mwikali is among the many women activists who faced online harassment after joining Kenya’s anti-femicide protests.
- A new report shows young women were targeted with AI-generated sexual images, insults and coordinated trolling, revealing how digital spaces mirror Kenya’s broader gender inequalities.
- Fida-Kenya has warned that tech-facilitated violence is escalating, particularly against women involved in protests, highlighting the urgent need for stronger laws, accountability from tech platforms and digital literacy for young women.
Rachael Mwikali remembers the hope she carried into the streets: to be heard and to see justice done. A long-time human rights defender, she joined thousands of Kenyans in the national anti-femicide protests of January and December 2024, demanding justice for women killed - many in chillingly brutal circumstances.
But what she did not expect was the wave of vitriol that followed. Across X, TikTok, Facebook and WhatsApp, women who marched to demand an end to femicide became targets of vicious misogynistic attacks. Rachael was among them.
“Women were body-shamed,” she recalled on November 27, 2025, during a forum organised by Fida-Kenya to mark the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. “But online violence is not new. It has always been there - it’s discrimination. Sometimes you don’t even recognise it because we have normalised it. Women’s bodies have become the battlefield for all forms of violence.”
An analysis of the #EndFemicideKE hashtag on TikTok and X shows the duality of digital spaces. While many people used the platforms to amplify calls for justice, others turned them into channels of hate. Women protesters were branded “sex entrepreneurs” and “prostitutes,” accused of immorality, or blamed for social problems such as abortion.
Woman Representatives were not spared either. As a collective, they were dismissed as “useless,” accused of failing to speak out or act decisively on femicide. The backlash intensified when Nairobi Woman Representative Esther Passaris attempted to address protesters at Jevanjee Gardens during the January protest. She was drowned out by chants of “go back home” and “where were you?”
Online, beyond the torrents of sexist insults, an old demeaning video was resurfaced to discredit and shame her. But the hostility was not confined to the anti-femicide protests. A new report by Amnesty International Kenya, focusing on tech-facilitated violence against young activists, shows that young women involved in the Gen Z–led protests of 2024 and 2025 faced digital abuse.
These included AI-generated sexual images, targeted harassment, coordinated troll attacks, and persistent misogynistic narratives designed to silence and intimidate them. Such violence reflects Kenya’s broader patterns of gender inequality, said Leticia Mwavishi, Programme Officer for Policy and Advocacy at Fida-Kenya.
Online spaces, she argued, simply magnify what is already deeply rooted offline. “Online violence is a manifestation of the offline violence we have normalised,” she said. “There is a need for coordinated effort to tackle it.”
She highlighted a recently completed study by Fida-Kenya and Nigeria’s Women Advocates Research and Documentation Centre, which examines the depth and dynamics of digital violence and outlines best practices for addressing it. The findings are set to be released soon.
Participants at the forum called for better enforcement of laws, stronger accountability mechanisms for tech companies, and survivor-friendly reporting systems. They also emphasised the need for digital literacy, especially for young women who are disproportionately targeted.
For survivors like Rachael, the fight continues - both online and offline. She insisted that calling out digital misogyny is not a distraction from the femicide crisis; it is central to understanding it. “The violence women face online mirrors the violence they face in real life,” she said. “If we ignore one, the other will keep growing.”
