September 29, 2026
Digital violence feels impossible to contain.
Harassment, cyberstalking, abuse, and intimidation spread faster than platforms can respond. Young women are the primary targets—and many fear that reporting will lead to blame, humiliation, or indifference. So survivors stay silent. Not because they don’t know how to report. Because they have no reason to believe it will help.
In Kenya, that gap is measurable. 72% of police officers surveyed have never been trained to handle online abuse. 61% have no protocol for it at all. Only 8% of cases end in a conviction.
After years of working directly with survivors and law enforcement across conflict-affected communities, our teams have learned something different. Safety from digital violence isn’t just a technology problem. It’s a trust problem. And trust can’t be built through better platform policies alone. It has to be built between survivors and the institutions meant to protect them.
Our team in Kenya is working to close that gap directly. Last month, more than 4,000 police recruits went through Search’s training in Kenya, learning how to investigate online abuse, how to treat survivors with dignity instead of doubt, and how to build real cooperation with their communities rather than just enforce rules on them.
More than 4,000 police recruits in Kenya completed Search’s training on digital violence.
Then something unexpected surfaced. The same online spaces where harassment and hate speech spread unchecked are the spaces violent extremist groups use to recruit people who feel isolated, angry, and pushed to the edges. Recruits learned that protecting a survivor and interrupting a path to radicalization can be the same action, done well.
That’s the shift this training is building toward: law enforcement equipped with real skills, and trusted enough by their communities to use them.
Your support helps put this training in front of the next 4,000 recruits—before the next survivor has to decide whether reporting is worth the risk.
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