By Cindy Gichuhi
During the month of February it is only fit to talk about love, but sometimes love can swiftly move from warm and endearing to suffocating and harmful. KICTANet opened the floor to this conversation because digital communication has fundamentally changed how we express love, navigate relationships and unfortunately, how harm is perpetrated, and these two are far more connected than we would like to admit.
Building on their research on Unmasking the Trolls and the lexicons developed in Ateso, Luo, Kikuyu and Somali, KICTANet used the month of love as a deliberate, accessible entry point into a much harder and needed conversation about digital safety, consent and respect. The goal was simple, to bridge the gap between the language we use to celebrate connection and the language we weaponise to cause harm, because the same linguistic creativity that powers the Gen Z romance is also what makes technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) so difficult to detect and so easy to hide.
A Modern Courtship
It is becoming a rare occurrence for love stories to begin outside our digital devices. The rom-com story line of bumping into someone and building the courage to ask them out is fading with the times. Many love stories are now beginning with a request, or a swipe and a like. Sliding into DM’s is how many courtship stories are now beginning. Perfectly curated Tinder profiles made to attract, your photos, your bio and your prompts, everything you need to give your eventual love a glimpse of their future.
When someone likes what they are seeing they move it into the DM’s, from there on everything done is strategic and intentional, because these are the new love letters; coded, digital and deliberate. From favourite colours, to their pet peeves and eventually the first meet up — but this is no stranger. Daily communication, emotional investment and the growing tension between you but no one wants to give labels and come clean about the pressure building in their chest. Eventually the dreaded question is asked, “What are we?” and this may sink the boat or be the mark to the beginning of your love story.
Even with these defined lines, everything is still deliberate and strategised, hinting at your love with a picture of your partner’s hand with a silent love letter. Then eventually the awaited launch reaches, a picture and a bio update that confirms your relationship status with a perfectly curated song in the back. Finally your love can be publicly celebrated.
The Public Performance of Privacy
Your love story has now blossomed and this perfectly wrapped gift starts to unravel; eyes and opinions with unwelcome comments from your audience. Every movement is noted and studied, with reports of what your partner may be doing or not doing right. A different type of tension starts rising. Arguments share the same tone as your admiration and you are left talking to a brick wall when a fight arises. Just as strategic as the foundation of the relationship was, so is how the rest of the flow continues.
Indirectly directed posts, to shared screenshots in group chats, makes mediating this love story hard and finally the fixture crumbles. Your heart is heavy but that is the least of your worries, the next question comes; “How will you handle this public fall out?”. Will you wipe your account clean of their existence or will you act unbothered and simply move on with your life and maybe eventually confirm the end of this chapter in your story. In a perfect world, everyone would move on and continue to live but this chapter on your end refuses to close and this partner refuses to be written away and they continue to tune in and eventually the boundary is crossed.
The Unraveling
In a perfect world, everyone would move on and continue to live. But this chapter refuses to close, and this partner refuses to be written away. They continue to tune in, and eventually, the boundary is crossed. It rarely announces itself loudly. It creeps in through a screenshot shared without permission, an intimate image weaponised in anger and a location constantly monitored under the guise of care. For many young people, especially women and girls, this is where a love story stops being a love story and becomes something far more sinister: Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence.
We throw around acronyms like TFGBV and OGBV but let us be honest about what they actually look like in real life. It looks like your private moments being shared publicly without your consent. It looks like being cyberstalked by someone who once knew your favourite colour. It looks like coordinated harassment from strangers pointed at you by someone who once called you their person. It looks like your address being leaked online and for people whose gender expression or sexuality sits outside what society considers conventional, it looks like being outed with your identity being wielded like a knife threatening to end your life.
What makes this even more insidious is that much of this harm is delivered and warped as affection. “I am doing this because I love you.” “If you loved me you would not have left.” “I will expose you because you hurt me.” Intimacy twisted into leverage and trust dismantled into a weapon.
“Kukuanika” and the Language of Coercion
In our context there is a word that captures this so precisely it is almost chilling,”Kukuanika”. To be exposed.It sounds casual, almost like gossip, the kind of word that floats around timelines without much weight. But when someone says “nitakuanika” in the context of an intimate relationship, that lightness is a disguise. It becomes coercion and a threat dressed in familiar language, hiding in plain sight.
The problem that we are forced to face is that so much of this harm lives in language that platforms cannot read, algorithms cannot detect, and content policies that were never written cannot address. Abuse delivered in our local languages and with slang that moves faster than the moderation and the harm continues — visible to the community it targets, invisible to the systems meant to protect them.
Naming the Unnamed: Building Lexicons as an Act of Protection
This is why KICTANet’s work of building lexicons in Ateso, Luo, Kikuyu, Kiswahili and Somali is not just research, it is an act of protection. It is the deliberate, painstaking work of naming what has been allowed to go unnamed. Making what has been hidden in plain sight visible.By saying that this phrase, in this language, in this context, is harmful because you cannot moderate what you do not understand. And you cannot protect people from violence you refuse to name.
Love in the digital age is expressive, creative, public and deeply human. But language is hardly ever neutral with the same words that made someone feel chosen being used to make them feel trapped. The same platforms that held your soft launch being used to orchestrate your undoing. The same intimacy that built the relationship can be weaponised to destroy the person. So as we celebrate the language of connection this February, let us also commit to knowing the language of harm. Let us close the gap between the love we express online and the safety we deserve there.
Cindy Wanini Gichuhi is the Programme intern for Gender and Tatua Digital Resilience Centre.