September 10, 2026
You might think online harassment is simply the price of being visible.
That if you speak up publicly, especially as a young woman, cruelty is just part of the deal. Block the trolls, toughen up, keep going. That’s the advice survivors hear most.
But Search for Common Ground knows it doesn’t have to stay that way. Our work in digital spaces has shown us something different.
Amina. In Nairobi, is a student activist who used social media to push back on harmful narratives about young people and women. The criticism she expected. What came next didn’t fit that story: anonymous accounts publishing her personal information, coordinated threats, strangers picking apart her character and appearance.
Amina blamed herself first. “I convinced myself that perhaps I was the problem,” she says. “People kept saying that this is simply how social media works, and I started believing them.”
She wasn’t alone in that belief. A local study of young adults found that nearly nine in ten had witnessed this kind of online abuse. Thirty-nine percent had experienced it directly. Almost none of it was being treated as what it was.
A training Search ran gave Amina something more useful than sympathy: a framework. She learned how to preserve evidence, how to use the legal protections already on the books, and to recognize harassment as a pattern rather than a personal failing.
She came back online. Today she advocates and supports other young women navigating what she went through.
“Before the training, I thought staying quiet was the safest option,” she says. “Now I understand that silence protects perpetrators, not survivors.”
Across five counties, 178 people have now gone through that same training. In one city, 97.5% came out of it confident they could respond to online abuse. Almost all of them, for the first time, knew where to actually report what was happening to them.
That’s not a shift in tone. That’s a shift in what people believe they’re allowed to do about it.
Your support trains the next person who turns a survivor’s worst week into the reason someone else never has to go through the same one alone.
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