A few days ago, as part of an outdoor arts event, I read excerpts from two stories in Silent Girl, one of them “Kesh Kumay,” which takes place in Kyrgyzstan. I related the statistic that a third of marriages in Kyrgyzstan result from non-consensual kidnappings (versus the consensual kind we call elopements). A woman came up to me afterward and told me she had traveled extensively in countries we criticize for their treatment of women.

“We shouldn’t be too quick to judge them,” she said. Maybe a third of marriages result from kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, she noted, but “one in four women” in our country are assaulted by their partners. “Exotic” abuse is always more interesting to talk (and write) about.  We should mind our own business before pointing fingers overseas.

So, is it one in four – 25%? The latest stats I could find, from Family Violence
in Canada: A Statistical Profile 2005 from Statistics Canada, indicated that seven per cent of women and six per cent of men end up abused by their current or former partners. In terms of numbers, that works out to an estimated 653,000 women and 546,000 men. The reported abuse included having something thrown at them and/or having been:

•    pushed, shoved or grabbed;
•    threatened to be hit;
•    beaten or choked;
•    slapped;
•    kicked, hit or bit; and
•    sexually assaulted

The data showed that female victims of spousal violence were more than twice as likely to be injured as male victims. Women were also three times more likely to fear for their life, and twice as likely to be the targets of more than 10 violent episodes. And, overall, female victims were twice as likely as male victims to be stalked by a previous spouse.

So, women are at greater risk of serious injury than men but what are we to conclude about the nearly equal numbers of men and women reporting spousal abuse?

When I began writing my story “Deep Dark Waves,” I intended to portray a  “typical” domestic abuse situation: man as aggressor, woman as victim.  But my research unearthed a more intriguing scenario: woman gets off on violence, is in fact addicted to it. It was so much more interesting to me as a writer. But I realized the story could be controversial. A woman who interviewed me on the radio said she was “conflicted” when reading “Deep Dark Waves” for that reason.

Several people have reviewed the book but, so far, the radio interviewer is the only one who has commented on the disparity between what we believe to be true about domestic violence and the scenario my story presents. Because we don’t believe that women are violent, we don’t have any services in place to counsel those who are. And because our society considers a man who can’t defend himself against a “mere” woman to be weak, he may be too ashamed to seek help. If he does, we can’t offer him much. So, our beliefs aren’t doing us much good.

That is…if we believe the stats. Do you?

Three years ago, I completed a story that drew upon the phenomenon of bride kidnapping, or ala kachuu, in Kyrgyzstan. That story, “Kesh Kumay,” part of the Silent Girl collection, was ignited by Petr Lom’s moving documentary “Kidnapped Brides “on CBC’s Passionate Eye in 2004. At the time, I had no idea that women were kidnapped into marriage in Kyrgyzstan. How many women, Lom didn’t know. In this interview, he said, “there are almost no scholarly studies on the subject, and the international human rights community has given the subject almost no attention.”

As a woman, I was horrified by what the documentary revealed. As a writer, I was excited. I had been looking for a modern counterpart to Shakespeare’s Kate (The Taming of the Shrew). When one woman tells Lom, “After the kidnapping, you’ve no choice —you start loving, even if you don’t want to, you have to build a life,” I knew I had found my Kate in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.

It took me many months to write that story as I needed to research life in Kyrgyzstan as well as the history and practice of ala kachuu. My research led me to conclude that women had fared better under the Soviets when it came to human rights. It was the Soviets that had made ala kachuu illegal as far back as 1927. It is still against the law, but ever since Kyrgyzstan became an independent republic in 2001, incidents of ala kachuu have become more frequent and the police seem to look the other way. As this 2004 article in Women’s News relates, the status of women fell in many areas following independence.

Recently I came across the name of Dr. Russell Kleinbach, professor of sociology at Philadelphia University. He was a Fulbright Lecturer at Osh State University in Kyrgyzstan from 1998-1999 and has made bride kidnapping one of his scholarly pursuits. (Apparently Petr Lom did not know about Kleinbach’s work with Sarah Amsler, instructor of Sociology at American University in Kyrgyzstan.) I wrote to Kleinbach and inquired about the current situation.

“I can say small progress is being made on the ala kachuu problem,” he wrote back. “For the first time, there are now crime statistics on kidnapping.”

He sent me a table of those statistics for 2006. Out of 73 cases that were registered with law enforcement agencies, 53 were dismissed and 16 were treated as criminal. It’s hard to say how many cases go unreported. Articles I had come across during my research indicated that as many as a third of Kyrgyz marriages result from non-consensual kidnappings (as opposed to consensual elopement type kidnappings). Kidnapped women are pressured by their parents to accept the marriage so that they won’t be “cursed.” Often the marriage is consummated by force, leaving the woman “spoiled” and unlikely to attract another husband.

Dr. Kleinbach also wrote, “We have done enough research to know a lot about non-consensual kidnapping, including that it is not an ancient Kyrgyz tradition, in addition to being illegal and not allowed in Islam. While the practice continues with tragic consequences, it is sometimes successfully resisted. This summer we plan to begin a one year study to test the effectiveness of our anti kidnapping educational program.”

Image of yurts beside Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan