Chris Schwartz, an American academic who teaches journalism in this leafy Central Asian capital, was waiting for a bus near a colossal female statue dedicated to revolutionary dead and a shuttered bar called Fat Boys when the expensive black SUV glided up. Three men sprang out. They grabbed a startled young woman on the sidewalk and began dragging her toward the car. She pleaded for them to stop. About 30 commuters at the bus stop watched impassively.
“Only myself and a 12-year-old boy intervened,” Schwartz recalls. “The boy decided to just follow us and record the situation with his mobile phone, which was enough to drive the main guy's two accomplices into a panic.”
The woman’s brother arrived. Schwartz helped him convince the abductors to free the woman. The leader of the assailants furiously threatened Schwartz. But Schwartz caught a flicker of shame in his eyes. “He was conflicted,” Schwartz says of the attempted daytime abduction in April. “He was wavering.”
Score a small victory against bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, a nation where as many as 40 percent of the country’s women are hauled, sometimes literally screaming and kicking, into forced marriages. The kidnapper Schwartz thwarted was a prospective bridegroom. He was on the hunt. The bus stop woman, who appeared to know her attacker slightly, was his chosen quarry. She fled into a nearby apartment building.
Bride kidnapping isn’t unique to Kyrgyzstan.
The traumatic social practice, which often locks young women into loveless marriages and stunted economic futures, occurs elsewhere in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Africa. Some groups of Romani, or Gypsies, kidnap brides as well. But Kyrgyzstan became infamous as the world’s “capital of bride kidnapping” in the early 2000s, when researchers and activists revealed the epidemic proportions of the tradition.
Called kyz ala kachuu, or roughly "grab and run," bride kidnapping is defended by older generations of Kyrgyz as part of Central Asia’s ancient nomad culture. When clans roamed the region’s mountains and steppes, men on horseback commonly abducted women from outside their tent-like yurts and galloped away with their quarry slung across their saddles. Most historians, however, challenge this romantic justification.
Bride kidnappings actually were rare in pre-modern Kyrgyzstan, anthropologists say. Centuries ago, such abductions usually masked a voluntary elopement: a way for love-struck couples to escape arranged marriages. The antique practice, once severely punished, only resurfaced in recent decades.
Why?
Some experts blame a conservative male backlash against gender equality laws imposed during years of socialist rule by the Soviet Union. Kidnapping village women into marriages effectively blocked female urban migrations—and hence liberalization. The economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet empire in the 1990s made the problem worse. Throngs of jobless young men in Kyrgyzstan could no longer afford marriage dowries. So they took matters into their own hands under the banner of a folk custom.
“I didn’t even know my kidnapper,” says Ainura Smailova, a Bishkek linguist who was abducted from her university dorm in 2005. She was 22. “He was a distant relative. One day he and his friends shoved me into a car, locked the doors, and drove me to their village two hours away.”
"They told me I’d adjust" to kidnapping, says Ainura Smailova, who was abducted for a forced marriage.
Paul Salopek
At the hopeful groom’s house, Smailova faced the same life-altering dilemma that has confronted tens of thousands of Kyrgyz young women on similarly fateful days.
In Kyrgyzstan, a mostly rural and majority Muslim country, a woman’s virtue is compromised—whether or not a physical relationship is actually consummated—if she spends a single night in a strange man’s house. Knowing this, the bridegrooms’ relatives exert every pressure to keep a kidnapped wife-to-be indoors. The unwilling bride is often guarded in a corner or on a couch. A curtain cordons her off. The household’s female elders, often kidnapped brides themselves, take turns trying to persuade her to accept her abductor. They wrestle to tie a white scarf to her head, symbolizing her willingness to be married. They kill a sheep and prepare a wedding feast.
“I was ripping my scarf off and fighting them.” Smailova says. “The boy’s mother and aunts were very aggressive. I even kicked one old woman who was bullying me.”
After being trapped in the house for five hours, Smailova’s parents rescued her. She was in a lucky minority. In many cases, even if the woman escapes, she carries a stigma. The families of kidnapping victims often will not accept their “tainted” daughters back.
“Until recently bride kidnapping wasn’t even considered a serious crime,” says Rimma Sultanova, a sex therapist who has spent years documenting the phenomenon in Kyrgyzstan. “In the old days the standard fines for stealing a sheep were higher than for stealing a girl.”
Hard numbers are scarce. But Sultanova says kidnappings in Kyrgyzstan reached about 11,800 cases in 2011, the latest year when data is available. Some of those cases were consensual, she says. But roughly 2,000 of the abducted women reported that they had been raped by their unwanted grooms. Another study the following year highlighted the startling scope of the practice: as many as 80 percent of the wives in one Kyrgyz village had been kidnapped.
Still, activists say that public attitudes on bride kidnapping—incidents of bus stop passivity aside—do appear to be shifting in Kyrgyzstan.
The government significantly hardened the criminal penalty for bride kidnapping in 2013. Perpetrators now face between seven and ten years in prison. And while only a handful of complaints have been filed so far against the abductors, the topic is at least now squarely in the public domain.
“There have been lots of education campaigns, and many documentary films have been made,” says Gulzira Kamytzhanova, a social worker for Save the Children in Bishkek who is familiar with the bride kidnapping issue. “It’s impossible to hide it anymore. More women are moving to cities. They’re becoming more emancipated.”
Tursunkan Estebesova and her daughter, Mereem, were both targets of bride kidnapping—one successful, one failed.
Paul Salopek
Like Tursunkan Estebesova.
Estebesova, 73, was a country girl kidnapped into a marriage by man she met only briefly, at a movie theater in Bishkek. He was 27. She was 19.
“There was no love for us,” Estebesova says of her now deceased husband, who tricked her into a taxi on the false premise of helping him with family emergency. The driver had been paid to speed her, without stopping, to a wedding banquet: her own.
“We were married 45 years,” Estebesova says with a shrug. “We just learned to respect each other.”
Yet more recently, when it became the turn of her grown daughter, Meerim Dzholdosheva, to be targeted for a botched bride kidnapping, Estebesova knew what to do. She started walking her daughter to bus stops to fight off any second abduction attempts. And she carried a letter from her daughter requesting a rescue by the police.
