When men speak up about abuse, society must listen

It is cruel to tell someone to speak up, then punish them for doing exactly that. That’s what we are doing to our men.

Earlier this year, some men who had survived domestic violence, and said so publicly, were trolled online. In those moments, they had expressed views on completely unrelated issues—not about their abuse. But people dragged in their history anyway with a covert message—a man who has been a victim may speak, but only to a certain limit. The moment he forgets that, someone will remind him. Step outside them and the abuse you survived will be used to silence you; half-man, useless, cannot even control his own house, among others.

That is the Kenya we live in, in 2026. Ponder that.

The 'lesser man' myth

For more than 20 years, people, including advocates, journalists, and policymakers, have been trying, chipping away at the idea that a man who admits pain is somehow a lesser man. Several initiatives have been put in place including helplines, policies that align and campaigns urging men to speak, seek help and show up differently. The argument has always been that silence is the real enemy; that when men do not talk, everyone suffers.

So men have slowly, cautiously, begun to talk. Some of what they say is that they too have been hurt by partners, systems and a world that didn’t offer room for their pain.

The response, far too often, has been mockery.

This is not a small thing to brush aside. It cuts to the centre of what gender equality actually looks like when it leaves the conference room and lands in real life. Either we are building a society where survivors can speak without being destroyed for it, or we are building one where the rules shift depending on who is speaking. We cannot honestly claim to be doing both.

To be absolutely clear, and this clarity matters, women and girls carry a disproportionate burden of gender-based violence in this country. The data has been consistent on this for years. The daily lived experience of women across Kenya confirms it. Any honest conversation about gender must begin there and hold that ground firmly.

But holding that ground does not require dismissing male pain. In fact, it is weakened by doing so.

Some of what passes for gender discourse these days has quietly become a door with a bouncer outside it—a suspicion that acknowledging male suffering somehow dilutes the cause, that any space given to men is space taken away from women. This is a false trade. Stigma does not negotiate. A society that teaches men that seeking help is weakness, that surviving abuse is humiliation and that speaking out invites ridicule pays a heavy price. It pays it in silence, which can kill.

Rising suicide

This is not a policy paper argument. People have died. In county after county, men have been dying by suicide—young men, fathers, boys who had barely started living. The reasons vary: It is the debts they owe, the marriage that is falling apart, the illness that is costly and won’t go away, and the weight of societal expectation that says a man must carry all of it silently. But behind many of those deaths runs the same quiet thread. They did not ask for help. They could not bring themselves to because they had watched what happens when men do.

When a crowd greets a male survivor with mockery, it is not just being unkind to one individual. It is broadcasting a message to every man quietly watching—every man who has wondered in private whether his experience counts, whether his pain is real and whether anyone will believe him if he speaks. The crowd has already decided. No.

Media plays a big role here. Newsrooms that cover femicide with the urgency it deserves, and they should, must honestly ask whether they bring the same seriousness to male survivors. Not the same space on the page; that would be dishonest. Just the same willingness to treat the pain as real and not to turn it into entertainment.

Social media is the elephant in the room; a harder animal to tame. But mainstream media sets the tone. What a newsroom decides to take seriously, and what it quietly let go, does not evaporate after the paper is printed or the story is aired. People absorb it and learn what counts and what does not from the story.

Gender equality has always been a project about human dignity; confronting the ideas and systems that have always decided whose suffering matters and whose does not. That project loses its moral footing when it becomes selective.

The men targeted online earlier this year were not seeking special treatment. They were simply living as people with a past, as we all do. What they received instead was a direct reminder that in the court of public opinion, a man's past abuse can always be retrieved and used against him the moment he becomes inconvenient.

Call it what it is. It is cruelty; only the target has changed.

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