Kyrgyzstan: Bride-Kidnapping, Domestic Abuse Rampant
Despite Progressive Laws, Violence Against Women Goes Unpunished

September 26, 2006

Related Materials:

Reconciled to Violence

Many Kyrgyz officials portray bride-kidnapping as a harmless ritual, a voluntary practice. But women all over the country paint a very different picture. Abduction for forced marriage is a violent and traumatic experience that involves taking a woman against her will. It’s a serious crime, and police need to start treating it that way.

Acacia Shields, senior researcher

Kyrgyzstan’s government is allowing domestic violence and the abduction of women for forced marriage to continue with impunity, Human Rights Watch said today in its first report on human rights violations in this Central Asian country.“Police in Kyrgyzstan have an obligation to ensure that perpetrators of domestic violence and bride-kidnapping are brought to justice,” said Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “But more often than not, they simply don’t treat these as serious crimes.” The 140-page report, “Reconciled to Violence: State Failure to Stop Domestic Abuse and Abduction of Women in Kyrgyzstan,” concludes that although Kyrgyzstan has progressive laws on violence against women, police and other authorities fail to implement them. As a result, women remain in danger and without access to justice. Based on in-depth, firsthand interviews with victims of violence, the report tells the stories of women who have been kicked, strangled, beaten, stabbed and sexually assaulted by their husbands. The report also tracks what happens when women seek help from the authorities. Instead of attaining safety and access to justice, they are encouraged to reconcile with their abusers.A 38-year-old woman, “Elmira E.” told Human Rights Watch about being beaten by her husband for years and hospitalized, once for a knife wound and another time for a concussion after he kicked her in the head. “The situation was so bad that I thought it would be better if he killed me,” she said.Women suffer serious and permanent injury from domestic violence, and many are emotionally traumatized by the abuse, even years later. Left with nowhere to go and no access to police protection, many women lose hope. The report also examines the controversial issue of “bride-kidnapping,” or abduction for forced marriage. Women and girl victims of bride-kidnapping describe being grabbed, forced into cars, isolated and in some cases raped by their abductors.“Many Kyrgyz officials portray bride-kidnapping as a harmless ritual, a voluntary practice. But women all over the country paint a very different picture,” said Acacia Shields, senior researcher and author of the report. “Abduction for forced marriage is a violent and traumatic experience that involves taking a woman against her will. It’s a serious crime, and police need to start treating it that way.”Despite government claims that abduction of women by complete strangers is rare, many women told Human Rights Watch that they were kidnapped by men they did not know. In other cases, acquaintances use deception to kidnap a woman – often inviting her to a party or offering her a ride home from school, and then shuttling her off without warning to the home of her abductor.Seventeen-year-old “Feruza F.” was raped on her wedding night by her abductor, a stranger until that day: “He forced me to have sex with him the first night. A woman came to say that they’d prepared my bed; I thought I’d be alone. I lay down to sleep, then he came in and he forced himself on me and raped me. I was saying no and he still did it. I cried and screamed…There were other times, too, when he raped me. I didn’t ever want to go to sleep.”Human Rights Watch challenged the government of President Kurmanbek Bakiev to make ending violence against women a priority. The report called on the government to implement its domestic violence law, including by issuing guidelines for protection orders and directing police to enforce such orders. It also called on the government to enforce existing criminal laws against assault and abduction and to prosecute perpetrators of domestic violence and kidnapping to the fullest extent of the law. Kyrgyzstan’s international donors should increase financial and technical assistance to civil society organizations providing services to women and girls who have suffered violence. “A strong and sustained international focus on this issue, coupled with concrete support, is needed if we are to see real improvement in the lives of women in Kyrgyzstan,” said Cartner.

By Iva Skoch — Special to GlobalPost
Published: October 12, 2010 14:40 ET in Offbeat

Many who were kidnapped claim they went on to live a perfectly happy life. “Other women, typically older women, are the ones trying to convince the girls to do it and encouraging the practice to flourish," Ryskulova said. "They will say, 'see, I also got married this way and I'm happy.'"

Anara Niyazova, head of the law department at the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavonic University has a suggestion for halting the practice: stop romanticizing bride kidnapping, and don't infer that the girls were asking for it.

“Our culture has a stereotype that girls should behave in ways that's imposed by society. That she provoked the kidnapping herself,” she said.

As a result women here rarely start criminal proceedings, even though bride kidnapping has been outlawed since 1994. Moreover, rural youth don't see other marriage strategies. "Village men hardly ever interact with women," Niyazova said. "They sit in a sheep market and when they see somebody they like, they will just take them. [Kidnapping] is caused by an absence of dating skills.”

Educated Kyrgyz women, such as Nuraiym Orozobekova, agree that dating methods need to be taught and women need to push back. She became an anti-kidnapping advocate after her mother told her a family friend's son was planning to kidnap her.

"I didn't want to get married this way. I decided to stop this criminal activity," she said. The challenge, Orozobekova said, is that many people in Kyrgyzstan — male and female — still don't see a huge value in women. "It used to be that if you stole a domestic animal they would cut off your finger," she said. "But stealing a woman wasn't prohibited."

Orozobekova has successfully avoided being abducted. She is still single, but now that she is 27, she is most probably too old to be a prime target for kidnapping.

"If a boy likes me, he will have to use another method. If he prefers kidnapping, it just means he isn't confident enough to get a girl another way," she said.

"I'm not a sheep. I'd like to choose, too."

Editor's note: Wanderlust is a regular GlobalPost series on global sex and relationship issues written by Iva Skoch, who is now traveling the world writing a book on the subject.

GlobalPost featured this article in "Great Weekend Reads," a free compilation of the week's most colorful stories. To receive Great Weekend Reads by e-mail, let us know at .

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — Munara didn't want to be kidnapped.

Some Kyrgyz girls look forward to the time they get "chosen" by a man, but Munara, 18, already had a boyfriend and hoped to marry him.

"If only my boyfriend managed to kidnap me first," she said.

Six months ago two men stuffed her into an old Lada automobile and drove her to their house.

"I really don't want to be kidnapped. I don't want to get married," she said she screamed at them. "Please let me go," she begged.

They didn't. Few men here take a woman's pleading seriously because girls playing hard-to-get is par-for-the-course during the ritual of bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, the mountainous Central Asian country that has suffered brutal inter-ethnic clashes since April. Violence against women has also been on the rise, according to Talaigul Isakunova, an expert on gender issues who works with the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The practice was famously parodied in the 2006 film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, in which the main character kidnaps Pamela Anderson because he wants to marry her. This scene is a fictional, yet disturbingly accurate demonstration of the methodology behind bride stealing, except that it is even more prevalent in Kyrgyzstan than Kazakhstan.

Approximately one third of Kyrgyz women marry by means of non-consensual kidnapping, according to Russell Kleinbach, a sociology professor at Philadelphia University who has conducted extensive research into the custom of "kyz-ala kachuu," (or "grab and run") in Kyrgyzstan.

The rise in kidnapping in recent years is mainly economic.

"It's less expensive," said Kleinbach. People returned to kidnapping because Kyrgyzstan has faced severe economic problems in the last two decades, and many villagers have been able to avoid paying a generous "kalym," (bride price) dowry and providing plentiful wedding gifts by stealing a woman.

The other reason is social, Kleinbach says.

"It's an alternative for young men who were otherwise dependent on their parents to find them a bride," he said. "The tradition in Kyrgyzstan was for marriages to be arranged."

People in Kyrgyzstan often view bride kidnapping as an ethnic tradition, but studies show that this custom has evolved from a mutual decision into a rather violent incarnation. As a nomadic people, young Kyrgyz couples sometimes used to "elope" to avoid disapproval of their parents. But most Kyrgyz have since settled in villages and, according to Kleinbach, "if you are in a village, kidnapping doesn't really work well."

Kadyr Malikov, director of the Religion, Law and Policy research center in Bishkek said that while 80 percent of people in Kyrgyzstan are Muslim, the custom of kidnapping doesn't stem from Islam. "Kidnapping or marrying without agreement is a big sin in Islam," he said. "Islam tries to regulate the practice by only marrying couples who both agree with the wedding."

But girls like Munara are typically pressured to consent. Once she was brought into the house of the kidnapper, the matriarch of the family put a white scarf on her head, thereby proclaiming the couple married. The groom then went to the bride's parents' house, announced he kidnapped their daughter and offered kalym of approximately $700 in exchange for her.

Although Munara didn't want to marry him, her family accepted the price and forced her to stay, because bringing a kidnapped girl back into the family home would bring an unbearable stigma. It's generally assumed she'd no longer be a virgin and in a country where the "white sheet test" is still often used, nobody else would marry her.

Bubusara Ryskulova, director of the Sezim crisis center for women in Bishkek said many girls agree to live with the man who kidnapped them because they are shamed into it. "They are told from an early childhood to respect their elders and the elders are telling them to put the white scarf on their head,” she said. “It's very big psychological pressure.”

"If the girl doesn't agree, she might be raped, have a baby and now she really can't leave,” said Ryskulova. “And the men will sometimes say 'you never loved me anyway' which just gives them another excuse for more violence.”

But not all women are unhappy in these non-consensual marriages.

Bride kidnapping, also known as marriage by abduction or marriage by capture, is a practice throughout history and around the world in which a man abducts the woman he wishes to marry. Bride kidnapping still occurs in countries spanning Central Asia, the Caucasus region, and parts of Africa, and among peoples as diverse as the Hmong in southeast Asia, the Tzeltal in Mexico, and the Romani in Europe. In most countries, bride kidnapping is considered a sex crime, rather than a valid form of marriage. Some versions of it may also be seen as falling along the continuum between forced marriage and arranged marriage. The term is sometimes used to include not only abductions, but also elopements, in which a couple runs away together and seeks the consent of their parents later; these may be referred to as non-consensual and consensual abductions respectively. However, even when the practice is against the law, judicial enforcement remains lax, particularly in Kyrgyzstan, and Chechnya.

Bride kidnapping is distinguished from raptio in that the former refers to the abduction of one woman by one man (and his friends and relatives), and is still a widespread practice, whereas the latter refers to the large scale abduction of women by groups of men, possibly in a time of war. (See also war rape)

Some modern cultures maintain a symbolic kidnapping of the bride by the groom as part of the ritual and traditions surrounding a wedding, in a nod to the practice of bride kidnapping which may have figured in that culture's history. According to some sources, the honeymoon is a relic of marriage by capture, based on the practice of the husband going into hiding with his wife to avoid reprisals from her relatives, with the intention that the woman would be pregnant by the end of the month.[1]

Though the motivations behind bride kidnapping vary by region, the cultures with traditions of marriage by abduction are generally patriarchal with a strong social stigma on sex or pregnancy outside of marriage and illegitimate births.[2] In some cases, the couple collude together to elope under the guise of a bride kidnapping, presenting their parents with a fait accompli. In most cases, however, the men who resort to capturing a wife are often of lower social status, because of poverty, disease, poor character or criminality.[3] They are sometimes deterred from legitimately seeking a wife because of the payment the woman's family expects, the bride price (not to be confused with a dowry, paid by the woman's family).[4]