From Outrage to Action: Global Protests Against Gender-based Violence Resonate in Kenya

10 December, International Human Rights Day, marked the culmination of 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence (GBV), an annual global campaign that seeks to raise awareness of violence against women as a human rights violation and demand action to end it.

Around the world, there were few places where the call resonated more than Kenya, where this year evidence of a femicide epidemic became impossible to ignore.

Global campaign

The global campaign kicked off with mass mobilisations on 25 November, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Women took to the streets in country after country in Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico , and in Europe, from Portugal to Turkey . Women’s rights advocates and their allies rallied in several African countries, including Kenya as well as South Africa , and in Asia, notably in Indonesia .

Protests were peaceful and the right of assembly was largely respected, with notable exceptions in Turkey, where a planned protest in Istanbul was banned and security forces dispersed those who marched and arrested some, and Kenya, where police used teargas to disperse protesters – both sadly regular police responses to protests.

The United Nations (UN) campaign’s slogan was ‘Every 10 minutes a woman is killed. #NoExcuse. UNiTE to End Violence against Women’, and the campaign featured the launch of a global report on femicide published by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and UN Women. On the ground, protesters highlighted femicide figures reported by the UN and national monitoring organisations – often civil society groups that keep count when governments won’t – and demanded action to keep women safe and hold perpetrators accountable.

Civil society’s efforts to denounce femicide were joined by demands focused on legal or workplace discrimination, street harassment, cyberstalking and rape, with calls for responses from the most immediate – such as panic buttons and safe houses – to the longer-term and more systemic kind of change needed to dismantle the entrenched norms that underpin, legitimise and perpetuate GBV.

Year-long action

The mobilisations on 25 November and the campaign that followed were the culmination of a year-long grassroots effort by feminists around the world to condemn gender-based injustice and demand the right of all women to live free from violence.

The first global moment of mobilisation came on 8 March, International Women’s Day , with rallies in countries on every continent, often calling out the multiple forms of gendered violence that perpetuate inequality. This was particularly the case in Mexico, where 180,000 women marched in Mexico City, and many more throughout the country, in outrage at the 800-plus femicides recorded the previous year. Similarly, in Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, women took to the streets in numbers in response to a recent surge of femicides: 32 in the first two months of the year alone.

When they mobilised, whether on 8 March or 25 November, women around the world also expressed their solidarity with those who experience the heightened gendered violence that comes with conflict and those living under oppressive regimes of gender apartheid who are not free to speak out.

Beyond these emblematic dates, the year was punctuated by mobilisations against GBV, often triggered by high-profile cases of femicide which, thanks to years of work by women’s rights organisations, are increasingly recognised not as unavoidable but as egregious human rights violations that must be eradicated. Calls for change were loud in Kenya.

Kenya’s call to #EndFemicide

January saw a wave of protests under the banner #EndFemicideKE, sparked by a series of femicides that outraged public opinion. Femicide Count Kenya , a civil society group, documented 10 femicides that month alone, and a total of 504 between 2019 and 2024. Other civil society organisations such as the Center for Rights Education and Awareness and the Federation of Women Lawyers played a vital role in organising protests and advocacy campaigns.

Over 20,000 people participated in marches in the capital, Nairobi, and other cities in late January, condemning the crisis of femicide and longstanding problems in the police and judicial handling of GBV cases, and demanding government action. The online campaign gained significant support, with people sharing stories and demanding accountability.

But the violence continued. Between August and November, police reported 97 new femicide cases. Following a damning report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, released on 20 November, President William Ruto said GBV was ‘tragic and unacceptable’ and pledged some funding for anti-femicide efforts. However, the credibility of the government’s response was repeatedly questioned following the escape of a suspect who confessed to killing 42 women, and the use of police violence against anti-femicide protesters on both 25 November and 10 December.

The Kenyan women’s movement continues to call for better investigation and prosecution of GBV cases, the implementation of laws protecting women’s rights, the establishment of a special unit to deal with femicide cases, the creation of education programmes on GBV and the funding of support services for survivors. The government must show it’s prepared to hear these calls.

The struggle goes on

The context for women’s rights struggles is becoming increasingly challenging in more and more parts of the world. On top of the usual resource constraints and institutional resistance that typically result in limited and slow policy responses, growing anti-rights backlash , democratic backsliding and increased civic space restrictions , such as the protest constraints in Kenya, are raising safety concerns for activists.

But no one said it would be easy. Feminist activists have long struggled against the systemic violence that underpins gender hierarchies and injustices through the ups and downs of political tides, including in contexts of conflict, authoritarianism and repression. And they’ll continue to do so, opening windows every time a door closes. They’ll continue to work on all fronts: pushing for legal reform, seeking cultural change and supporting survivors. They’ll continue to combine street protests, online campaigning, community education and political advocacy, as much as each context allows. To tackle the enormity of the task ahead, they’ll need all the support they can get, from as many allies as they can find.

*CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report .

A longer version of this article is available here .

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org .

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