Men don't kill women due to immorality - here is the reason

Kenya recorded more than 500 reported cases of femicide in 2023 alone, according to data compiled by civil society organisations — a figure that activists argue significantly undercounts the actual toll. The pattern is consistent: a woman is killed, and within hours of the story circulating, public attention shifts from the act to the victim's behaviour, relationships, or lifestyle. The question becomes not why a man killed a woman, but what the woman did to invite it.

This inversion of responsibility is neither accidental nor culturally unique to Kenya, but it takes particular forms here. In online commentary, in police statements, and sometimes in courtroom arguments, the biography of the deceased becomes the story. Was she married? Was she out late? Was she faithful? These questions, posed as if they carry causal weight, obscure the only question that matters: why do some men believe they hold the right to end a woman's life?

The answer is structural. Gender-based violence is not driven by provocation — it is driven by the belief that women are possessions whose defiance is punishable. That belief is reproduced across institutions: in a legal system that historically classified domestic assault as a private matter, in schools that teach girls to manage male anger rather than teaching boys to govern it, in religious spaces that weaponise concepts of submission.

Kenya has a Domestic Violence Act and a Sexual Offences Act. The Gender Violence Recovery Centre at Nairobi Women's Hospital provides vital free services. What the country lacks is consistent enforcement and a collective willingness to name the structural cause without immediate deflection toward the victim's conduct.

Until femicide is treated as a political crisis rather than a series of private tragedies, the numbers will not change.