Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence in Kampala: When Visibility Becomes Risk for Women

In Kampala, a single post can change how a woman is seen.

A selfie after a night out at Bandali Rise. A TikTok filmed in a salon in Kisementi. A journalist sharing a take on the Speakership race on X. A small business owner posting her new Ankara stock on Instagram. These are ordinary moments in a city where life and livelihood now move through screens.

But for many women, being visible online comes with a second layer they never signed up for: attention that unfolds into harassment, and engagement that crosses into abuse.

Take what regularly happens to Ugandan media personalities. When a female journalist or TV presenter weighs in on politics or public affairs, the comment section rarely stays on the argument. Within minutes, strangers are remarking on her body, her relationships, her tone, her morality, anything except what she actually said. In the blink of an eye, screenshots are shared in WhatsApp groups, where the conversation grows more aggressive and more personal, away from any kind of public accountability.

Musicians and content creators know the pattern too. A single viral video, the kind that takes months of work to produce, can flood an inbox overnight with sexual messages, unsolicited images, and fake accounts either impersonating the creator or claiming to know her. Edited photos and fabricated rumours begin circulating in private networks. By the time anything gets reported or taken down, it has already reached hundreds of groups that no platform can touch.

But this isn’t only a story about women with large followings.

A university student at Makerere or Kyambogo posts a photo online. A stranger sends her a message, starting out friendly, but it quickly becomes sexual and threatening. She ignores it. More accounts appear. Her images get screenshotted and shared in groups she does not know of, among people she has never met. A woman running an online boutique finds fake accounts using her product photos to scam her own customers, or wakes up to a flood of negative comments clearly designed to bury her page’s credibility. Women using dating apps describe having private conversations screenshotted and circulated in group chats, not as evidence of anything, but as entertainment.

This is what Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) actually looks like in practice. Not one dramatic incident, but a slow accumulation. Messages that keep coming. Accounts that appear and disappear. Content that spreads quietly through private networks, where it is almost impossible to track or counter.

The harm is not only digital.

For some women, it creates a constant low-grade anxiety. Checking notifications stops feeling routine and starts feeling like bracing for impact. For others, the harassment leaks into physical fear, especially when messages include details about where she works or lives. There is also the social dimension: in a context where women are still judged more harshly for their online behaviour than men are, being targeted can be reframed as her fault: “She wanted the attention.”

The professional cost is just as real. A journalist starts avoiding certain topics. A business owner quietly pulls back her online presence. A content creator stops pushing for growth because visibility no longer feels like an opportunity; it feels like exposure. Across a city where so much economic and professional life now depends on being findable online, this is not a small thing.

And yet women in Kampala have not disappeared from these spaces. They are building audiences, running businesses, reporting the news, and shaping public conversation online, often despite all of the above. Visibility is not optional for them. It is necessary.

The problem is that the same visibility-creating opportunity is also creating exposure, and the systems meant to protect users — platform moderation, reporting tools, legal frameworks — consistently move more slowly than the harm does.

The question was never whether women in Kampala should be online. They are online. They will remain online.

The question is why that presence so reliably comes with risk attached, and what it would actually take to change that, without asking women to make themselves smaller to stay safe.