As Kenyan politicians grapple with their Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated photos widely shared on social media platforms allegedly by GenZs, a new form gender-based violence is silently crippling in the society mainly targeting young men of below the age of 30 years.

Kenya is among the developing countries with a high penetration of smartphones and access to the internet, with an estimated four in every 10 youth who are 75 per cent of the entire population using the digital gadgets.

Experts are now raising concern that this advancement in the technology database has intensified the emergence of the little-known technology-based violence.

According to United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is an act of violence perpetrated by one or more individuals that is committed, assisted, aggravated and amplified in part or fully by the use of information and communication technologies or digital media against a person based on gender.

The new forms of tech-gender violence the agency identified include sextortion (blackmail by threatening to publish sexual information, photos or videos), image-based abuse (sharing intimate photos without consent), doxxing (publishing private personal information), cyberbullying, online gender and sexual harassment, cyberstalking, online grooming for sexual assault, hacking, hate speech, online impersonation and using technology to locate survivors of abuse in order to inflict further violence.

A study on this emerging GBV carried out in Nairobi between 2019 and 2023 and featuring young people aged 15 to 29 years and tabled before the Kenya Population and Development Conference last week showed perpetrators were forcefully accessing the victims’ phones and accessing personal information stored in the gadgets.

Victims’ gadgets

Further, they would peep through the victims’ computers and tablets without their knowledge to check their communications on social media, while in the worst scenario they stole money after forcing them to enter passwords to unlock their mobile banking apps.

“Half of the young people are experiencing technology facilitated abuse and in this space, we find men are experiencing it more in the cohort that we studied. At least 57.7 per cent of young men experiencing technology facilitated abuse. And the question is, is it that women, because, physically they are not able to fight with men, they do it in the virtual spaces?” posed Prof Grace Ngare.

 However, in the family set up, a high number of young women are being subjected to more tech-abuse, especially by their relatives compared to their male counterparts.

Ironically, women living alone are safe from the tech abuse while young men living alone have increased the risk of tech abuse.

“A lot of our young people have internet access. For those who have these young people in the house, the Gen Zs, know they would rather lack food but they have access to the internet in the house. They really value it.”

Technology violence

 Sadly, Ngare pointed out research also found that the current and previous partner friends, acquaintances, some family members, either living with the youth or not living with them, were also culpable of perpetuating the technology violence among the victims.

“The gray area in this emerging kind of violence is that our policy frameworks and legal aspects don’t address it. In a way it becomes very hard even for those who are experiencing it to report it to the authorities,” Ngare clarified.

Prof Ngare narrated horrifying accounts of tech-violence victims documented in the study, where some of their partners, when they found them chatting on the phone they would send them to fetch some drinking water.

After putting the phones down, the suspecting partners would take their phones and looked at the conversation they were having with people.

Other victims resorted to locking themselves in a room when using the phone, or when chatting with their friends on social media platforms, but the matter would run out of hand at night because of having their phone conversations investigated by the perpetrators who at times hacked the accounts.