Repost This ArticleIN KYRGYZSTAN, tradition is arguably valued more than both religion and government. Which is perhaps why, in the rural parts of the country, almost half of all marriages are the result of a kidnapping. In this video, VICE’s Thomas Morton “follows/aids and abets a young groom named Kubanti as he surprises his teenage girlfriend Nazgul with the gift of marriage/kidnapping.”
The video is disturbing, but not exactly in the way I thought it would be. A young girl at a watering hole is grabbed by three or four boys and dragged kicking and screaming into a car — obviously that’s fucked up to watch. But the boys were more nervous than I imagined they’d be, particularly the groom-to-be. And female members of the groom’s family also converge on the sobbing bride, murmuring in soothing voices as they pin her down and force her into bridal attire.
Screenshot by VICE
The moment perhaps most seared into my brain is at 11:20, when the groomsmen ask Nazgul’s friend for help with the abduction. The boys don’t appear or sound threatening — they smile, as if plotting a prank with her.
“When you are close to the watering hole, we’ll come in this car and grab both of you, okay?”
“You can beat us, even cry,” one boy jokes with a teasing smile. The girl tries to smile back, stares at the ground submissively, and the brief flicker of emotion that passes on her face as she internally accepts that she’s about to betray her friend will likely haunt me for a long time.
Is this mess legal? Nope. But, as several family members of both the bride and groom point out, most brides eventually acquiesce.
“They seldom turn to the police,” said Bubusara Ryskulova, director of a local women’s shelter. “There are maybe only two or three cases a year when women who were kidnapped by force turn to us. Unfortunately, 95 percent of women stay, even if they don’t know him.”
Which was another surprise for me — in this case, Nazgul not only knew her ‘suitor,’ she’d discussed marrying him already, and actually planned on it. According to the friend who assisted with the kidnapping, Nazgul wanted to finish school before getting married. Her dream was to become a lawyer.
Kubanti knew Nazgul wanted to marry him eventually, so why humiliate and objectify her this way? Family members on both sides have the answer: Tradition. Ancient custom. Ritual.
Bullshit.
They do it because they can get away with it. And that, as Morton says, is the oldest and shittiest reason in the world. 
Michelle Schusterman
Michelle is a musician, writer, and teacher just trying to see the world while doing what she loves for a living. She's taught ESL in Salvador, Brazil and kindergarten in Suwon, Korea, and now she's a full-time freelance writer living in Seattle (just to keep the city alliteration going). She'll try pretty much any food once and believes coffee is its own food group.
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The kidnapping that they got to follow along with is obviously a “tamer” example of the practice…as you said, they knew each other and actually already talked about marriage, just not at the time they did it. What got me the most is the mother who talked about her daughter who committed suicide. How may similar stories are there?
There will be people (as there already are on YouTube) who defend this by saying we shouldn’t judge, we shouldn’t project our western beliefs on them, this is their culture, we should respect it. But I say that’s bullshit. Human rights trumps any tradition. I can’t stand it when people hide behind “tradition” and “culture” to abuse human rights.
”Human rights trumps any tradition.” <– yes.
Another oddity is that the girl never seems to react to, or even look at, the Westerner with the camera. Since obviously her family knew about the kidnapping in advance, it's not hard to believe she may have had an inkling. However, if the fear she's expressing during the ordeal isn't real, she's a tremendous actress.
The bottom line, as you said, is that this happens, it happens often, and in many cases, it ends tragically.
Yeah, holy moly that was difficult to watch. I hate the tradition argument. Hate hate hate.
But at the same time, I don’t entirely feel like the kidnappers in this incident were “bad” people. Completely misguided? Or am I making excuses for this? 100% confused and conflicted.
Carlo, the mother talking about her daughter’s suicide got to me too. Couldn’t help but cry over that.
Woa. I’m stunned, and I didn’t even dare watch the video. “Tradition” indeed. Barbaric more like it.
Funny, they likely don’t have any such nifty “ritual” for kidnapping/abusing men against their will.
”Friend zone” problem solved
Sounds like a pretty cool place to be dude.
http://www.Total-Privacy dot US
Ok, it *sounds* messed up but think about it for a moment. How many Women in the world *hope* to meet someone and he will “sweep me off my feet”. (What you see here is far more literal, but not that much different.) The girlfriend, the bride, the groom’s friends and the groom all think this relationship will work (or, we hope they would not have gone along with it) so…. How is that different from weddings in other societies? The only difference is that the bride does not get to force her ‘friends’ into wearing dresses they hate.
Yes, the girl *might* have gone on to school and (if she made the grades) become a professional, or she may have bombed out her groom marrying someone else in teh meantime and married the town drunk because there was no one else.
Yes, it does seem messed up. If the girl has a new, strong support system, she *can* be very happy almost regardless of how the marriage starts.
In the US an astonishing number of Women (like 60%) are convinced the marriage is a bad idea but go along with it anyway. How is that any better? Screwing up a dozen lives just to get a bunch of presents?
To me, the real question would be to talk to these Women 5 years on and to local Women married less violently and see the percentages of happiness. If the same or better, what is the problem?
What people in the comments seem not to notice in the video is that this way of doing is said (by the very filmaker !) to be in reaction to what these locals see in our western Culture, through our media (not mentioning that we are so proud of it that we export this model to other countries, by force if necessary…). They are delving into their own past culture … because OUR very “modern” model seem so crazy for them.
There are of course a lot of cases where bride kidnapping ends badly, but the reaction of the author of this article and several of those commenting is exaggerated. What people seem to be failing to understand is that the kidnapping of the bride in Kyrgyzstan is a symbolic gesture, the same way fathers walking their daughters down the aisle in the West is. We say that the father is ‘giving away’ his daughter. And indeed in the past that was more or less how it was. But very few daughters in the West are still ‘given away’ by their fathers. Yet the tradition of being walked down the aisle continues.
Many kidnapped brides in Kyrgyzstan want to marry their kidnapper. Everything has been agreed beforehand, and the kidnapping itself is just a ritual. Struggling and crying is the expected behaviour of the kidnapped bride, even if she wants to marry the kidnapper. That doesn’t mean that many Kyrgyz women end up marrying men they don’t want to, but it would pay not the confuse the issue.
The reason that some Kyrgyz women end up marrying men they don’t want to is that it would bring shame to their families. For all those who find this issue so offensive, it would be worth considering the societal values behind that, rather than the ritual of kidnapping. Family is far more important in Kyrgyzstan, as it is in most less economically developed countries, than it is in the West.
It is fine for us to say that human rights trump tradition. But why should they? Human rights are an invention of the West, and by attempting to foist them upon societies that are not ready for them, the result will only be negative. It is inevitable that as societies develop economically, they will also develop socially. Family size gets smaller, education becomes more important, and negative facets of the culture get discarded.
If you people are so upset by this practice, wait until it subsides. Jumping up and down about how it is atrocious and a contravention of our Western human rights will not help. An open and respectful conversation might do a whole lot better.
Hi David,
I tried to read your comment with an open mind. This is what I have to say:
You talk about this practice as being symbolic and that most of the brides that are kidnapped are aware of what is going to happen.
But, what about the ones who aren’t? What about the ones who are forced to marry the guy just because he wants to marry them, or because he’s seen them once and decided that he is in love with the girl.
You say- ‘The reason that some Kyrgyz women end up marrying men they don’t want to is that it would bring shame to their families.;- That thought itself is highly objectionable. As someone who is being victimized and forced into something that they do not want to do, the onus of upholding the honor of their families also lies upon them. The girls still go ahead with the ceremony but it’s not to say that they reconcile with the situations. It is not their choice, they have been made to sacrifice their lives against their wishes.
Just categorizing it as a violation of Human Rights is actually belittling the gravity of the act itself. It is actually a violation of Human Spirit, a Violation of dignity and a Violation of the option of having a choice, that has been taken away from a person.
With regards to waiting for the practice to subside, all I can say is social malpractices do not subside on their own. Jumping up and down about them, creating awareness is the first step towards trying to get them eradicated.
I come from India and while my country has come a long way from the days when women were subjected to malpractices and suppressed under the name of tradition, the fight is still on. One by one, on a to day basis. And creating awareness is a part of that fight.
I suppose being in a situation and experiencing it yourself helps one to understand what’s it’s like, so try and put yourself in a place where you might be forced to make a choice (even a small one) against your wishes and the decide how you feel about ritual and tradition, or kidnapping for that matter.
Priyanka
Different countries have different tradition… some “outsiders” might never understand, like arrange marriages, circumcision of men… for others these traditions are simply wrong. But the line between wright and wrong is fine in different countries.
Watching the video, I have so many mix feelings but nothing bad. Let me say this first, I do not agree with this kidnapping thing.
But I don’t see nothing wrong with this also…and nothing wright.
I simply understand it.
I mean I try to understand different cultures and their tradition because I like to believe I have an open mind and because I respect their “ways” of life.
Not everyone will agree with me with this and that’s fine, everyone is entitled with their own opinion.
However one can’t just judge another culture and their tradition especially with this documentary video of Kyrgyzstan. This is like judging a book by its cover…
This video creates controversy in which proving wright and wrong can be of great length.
I had no idea about this. It’s an atrocious practice and a complete assault on the rights of the woman. It takes the idea of an arranged marriage in a far deeper and darker place.
The “tradition” argument is a terrible excuse. I respect peoples’ ways of life, no matter how foreign they may seem to me, but I cannot respect something like this. You cannot put equal priority on tradition and human rights. Especially a tradition that causes so much shame, sadness, and even death. These women cannot be happy, and anyone who thinks that they are demonstrates a complete ignorance of human nature.
And one has to ask, in a society that allows, and even encourages this, what are their views on rape and domestic violence? I’m sure that rape is a byproduct of many of these cases, in which the woman is not quick to succumb. Very enlightening video, I appreciate that they touched on the repercussions for the family in the future. For example, the abandoned children. For women who never fully accepted the marriage, what becomes of the children? I can imagine that women may even try to murder their children if they hold enough resentment towards the father.
Terrifying to say the least, I am eager to learn more about this.
Human rights are largely an invention of the highly individualistic West. There is no stone anywhere where it is written that human rights are the most important things. Western societies have decided (very recently) that they are. As such, human rights have become a fairly significant part of Western culture.
Alll those people whose responses to this article is “human rights trump tradition”, what you are saying is “my culture trumps your culture”. I have yet to see a coherent argument here as to why Western human rights are objectively more important than those things that other societies consider more significant, like family cohesion.
I don’t want my children to grow up thinking they have to live according to my wishes, and marry those people I consider best. But I also refuse to tell someone from another culture than my culture is better.
I disagree. Human rights transcends culture. Here is the UN’s definition of human rights: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ What is happening here violates several of the articles.
I agree that human rights can be afforded particular status regardless of culture. But what makes them more important than culture?
And which human rights do we follow? A German court recently ruled that circumcision of boys for religious reasons violates a child’s right to physical integrity (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18604664). But by banning the procedure, is the court not infringing upon the right of Jews and Muslims to practice a religious rite that dates back thousands of years? The president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews called it a violation of the “right of religious communities to self-determination”.
Which rights have precedence? It’s easy to have an opinion on such a case, but it isn’t so easy to prove why that opinion is right. It’s even more difficult to make any kind of rules which fit all situations.
It’s all very nice to say “human rights trump culture”, but the reality isn’t as simple as the slogan.
Please clarify, Carlo Alcos
Very interesting Video, well done, just makes me realize how lucky we are to be allowed to choose our own destiny. Even if in the western world we have a lot of divorces, at least it is our choice.