The Cost of Silence: What Gender-Based Violence Takes From All of Us By Oscar Mkado

The cost of silence by Oscar Mkado delves into the widespread effects of gender-based violence, highlightingat silence safeguards perpetrators rather than victims, perpetuating societal harm.

That was the argument running through every contribution at the

What Women Want Summit 4.0 held in Nairobi,

where panellists participated as part of Women’s Month commemorations under the theme Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls. The summit gathered advocates, survivors, legal practitioners, and grassroots organisers around the issues that shape women’s lives: leadership, reproductive health, economic access, and gender-based violence.

That shift matters more than it might appear. When the System Becomes the Second Abuser Janet Sudi, Policy Lead for Social Development at the British High Commission, opened the session titled The Cost of Silence with a frame that stayed with the room. Over eighteen years working across diplomacy and development, she has sat across from women from informal settlements who describe being violated twice; first by the abuser, then by the institutions meant to help them.

“Silence is not just the absence of words,” she said. “It is the absence of justice, safety, dignity and hope.”

The cost shows up in health systems, in police stations that turn survivors away, in school yards where girls disappear before their dreams do. Sudi spoke about infrastructure not as a policy concern but as a barrier that operates every day. When she invited members of the Short Stature Association of Kenya to her events, they often did not come. The reason: the cocktail tables were too tall. Inclusion demands that level of intention, thinking through who cannot enter the room before you set it up. Her foundation, Spin Life Foundation, connects professionals with disabilities to job markets and pushes organisations toward accessible design.

For Sudi, disability inclusion and SGBV are inseparable.

Women with disabilities face rates of gender-based violence that are disproportionate, often at the hands of caregivers they depend on. When reporting systems exclude them and shelters are not built for them, their silence becomes enforced, not chosen. Accountability Starts Before the Courtroom Doris, founder of Sauti Abetti and an organiser from Baringo County, brought the conversation from policy to lived reality. She recalled meeting a girl who had not spoken in three or four years, not because she was born without speech, but because sustained family abuse had silenced her. Her education, her mental health, her future: all of it paying interest on a loan she never agreed to take.

“We are actually taking a high interest loan in which our daughters are being consumed,” she said.

Sauti Abetti uses storytelling as its tool, creating spaces where women speak from experience and where girls hear from survivors who sound like them. The narrative is shifting, Doris observed, precisely because it threatens those who profit from silence. But she kept returning to accountability: awareness of violence is widespread, but awareness alone does not stop a violation.

Someone must be held responsible.

That means examining how boys are raised, how cultural gatekeepers maintain harmful norms, and how communities move from knowledge to consequence. Liberating the Mind Before Changing the Law Maya, a researcher whose work spans Kenya and South Africa, challenged the room to think about structure. Sexual violence is not random, it is a performance of power. When a woman challenges that dynamic, whether by speaking in public, earning her own income, or simply existing without deference, she becomes a target. Economic empowerment, Maya stressed, is not a soft intervention.

“An economically empowered woman is an untouchable woman,” she said.

Abusers strip financial independence first, because dependency is the architecture of control. Community work must build agency before it builds anything else. She was equally clear about religion, often cited as justification for SGBV. Her position: no religion sanctions gender-based violence. The problem is that religious instruction has historically moved through men’s interpretations and settled into communities as truth beyond question. Liberating the mind means questioning those interpretations, not abandoning faith.

What Technology Enables and What It Hides

At the summit, Senator Crystal Asige, who has led efforts to reform legislation on technology-facilitated gender-based violence in the Senate, and Chief Justice Martha Koome, who has herself experienced various forms of online violence, both addressed the same tension: women need more than resilience when using digital platforms. They need protection built into the systems themselves. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence covers any harm mediated through digital tools: cyberstalking, non-consensual image sharing, hate campaigns targeting women in public life. A woman who contributes to a public conversation can find her past weaponised and her credibility dismantled within hours. The harm is psychological, but it escalates. Online dehumanisation creates the conditions for violence that moves offline.

And TFGBV silences not just survivors but everyone who watches it happen.

When one group withdraws from public discourse out of fear, the consequences reach politics, economics, and civic life. The OGBV tracker and lexicon work drew interest from the audience, many of whom wanted to understand how to contribute to the effort. That appetite for participation is itself a signal: the conversation has moved past awareness into action. The Work That Remains A survivor who attended the session, now a published author and health coach, put the closing argument plainly. She was raped at thirteen, spent years dissociating and keeping a secret her family pressured her to bury. When she finally named her abuser in her book, another woman came forward and revealed he had done the same to her. He is now in prison. Not because the system found him. Because she spoke. Her book is now used in schools. She wants it used more.

The panel did not claim that storytelling, lexicons, or training programmes are sufficient on their own.

They are not. What they are is a start, and a demonstration that the cost of silence is always higher than the cost of speaking. Silence is not neutral. It is a decision, one that allows harm to continue, systems to fail, and survivors to carry burdens that were never theirs to bear. If this conversation made anything clear, it is that gender-based violence is not a “women’s issue.” It is a societal failure. And like all systemic failures, it demands collective responsibility. Governments must enforce laws. Institutions must become safe and accessible.

Communities must challenge harmful norms.

And individuals, each of us, must choose to speak, to believe, to act. Because change does not begin in courtrooms or conferences. It begins in the moments we refuse to look away.

The cost of silence is far too high. So the question is no longer whether we are aware. It is: what will we do about it?

The Cost of Silence: What Gender-Based Violence Takes From All of Us.

By Oscar Mkado, Kenya Director CMO Mukasa Venture Partners LLC