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| kidnap2.jpg from Noriko Hayashi's "Grab and Run: Kyrgyzstan's Bride Kidnappings"-- Newsweek (Web) http://www.newsweek.com/grab-and-run-1634 |
US Media Representations of Bride Kidnapping
in Kyrgyzstan
by B.F.
In her 2001 article
“Feminism versus multiculturalism”, Leti Volpp argues[1] that
minority women are frequently portrayed as “victims of their culture”. That is,
Western accounts of violence against minority women tend to paint minority
women as lacking in agency, and completely under the control of “cultural”
forces (which somehow do not affect white, Western women). One particular
problem to which this applies is that of bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan (and
Central Asia in general). There have been a few representations of this
phenomenon in US media in the past ten years, most of which have confirmed
Volpp’s thesis. I will examine these representations in depth, and argue for
change in US media reporting of foreign violence against women. In particular,
we will see that there is some misrepresentation of bride kidnapping in US media,
and that there are many parallels that can and should be drawn between bride
kidnapping and violence against women in the United States. Because this is
inherently a women’s issue, we will be referencing work from feminist media
studies and feminist anthropology.
Bride kidnapping is a
phenomenon in Central Asia, and Kyrgyzstan in particular, that has gone through
an “apparent resurgence”[2] since
the decline of the Soviet Union. It tends to involve the abduction of a woman
by a man for marriage with or without her consent. The nonconsensual ones (the
ones that are the topic of this paper) often involve “three or four men, a car
and vodka”.[3]The
woman is often captured during the day as she is walking down the street, or
alternatively, she is lured out of her residence at night to be abducted. This
is often a traumatic experience for the victim of the kidnapping. Kidnapped
women are frequently raped or face threats of rape if they do not accept the
marriage.[4] Furthermore,
if a kidnapped woman escapes, she is often rejected by her family and village,
either because she has dishonored Kyrgyz tradition[5],
or because the kidnapping itself dishonored her family, and the only way to
restore honor is to go through with the marriage[6],
or possibly for some other reason, depending on the analysis. Bride kidnapping
can be viewed through a broader lens of a desire to go back to “traditional”
Kyrgyz customs after gaining independence from the Soviet Union.[7]
There are several
reasons why bride kidnapping is a particularly interesting phenomenon to
consider in the context of US media representations of violence against foreign
women. There has not been so much reporting done on bride kidnapping in the
first place, compared to many other reports of “conflicts” of women’s rights
with multiculturalism. For example, there have been many more discussions in
the Western media of various institutions banning the wearing of hijabs.
Because of the relative lack of reporting on bride kidnapping, I imagine that
there is also a less “self-aware” reporting. That is, the reporting that we see
is not filtered through a lens of awareness of minority women’s rights, which
might come about from discussions about a phenomenon that is reported on more
frequently. Thus, I think that by studying a less well-known phenomenon, we can
see more directly the ways that news institutions themselves view
violence against women perpetrated in other countries.
In “Feminism versus
multiculturalism”, Leti Volpp gives one perspective on how minority women are
represented in the West. She writes that “incidents of sexual violence in the
West are frequently thought to reflect the behavior of a few deviants – rather
than as part of our culture”, whereas acts of violence in the Third World “are
thought to characterize the cultures of entire nations.”8 She
argues that the consequences of this representation is that women (particularly
those from non-Western cultures) are deprived of agency in Western culture.
That is, they are portrayed as victims, and not as people who have power to
change their situations.
In my opinion, one of
the major contributions to this characterization of non-Western women is the
way that they are represented in Western media. My aim is to study in the
particular case of Kyrgyz bride kidnappings how this is done. By looking at
specific reports about bride kidnappings in the US media, I will describe the
ways in which the reports support Volpp’s ideas. We will see that the
representations of Kyrgyz women serve to preserve a cultural hierarchy that
places the West at the top.
My method of research is
as follows. I have studied three news reports on Kyrgyz bride kidnapping from
the United States. The first is a website published by PBS including an article
about bride kidnapping, a video, and some facts and pictures; this was
published online in March of 2004. The second source is an ordinary news
article published in the New York Times written by Craig S.
Smith and published in April of 2005. Finally, my third source is a 2013 photo
essay by Noriko Hayashi published on the Newsweek website. I
want to use these reports from the last ten years to look at how modern US
media portrays violence against women in other cultures, to confirm Volpp’s
thesis about representations of “other” women.
All of the news reports
studied included pictures of Kyrgyzstan and Kyrgyz people along with the text.
In many ways, the way they use photography already marks a distinction between
Western people and Kyrgyz people. They almost always depict women in
“traditional” dress, often in situations that emphasize their cultural distance
from the Western world. The PBS report, for example, includes many pictures of
Kyrgyzstan, none of which have anything to do with the subject of bride
kidnapping. Most of the pictures are of rural scenery; one of them is a picture
of a woman milking a mare. All of this serves to exoticize Kyrgyzstan to the
Western eye, emphasizing the differences between the experiences of the
intended readers of the news and the subjects of the reports.
In some ways, there is
nothing wrong with these choices of pictures. Bride kidnapping is a primarily
rural phenomenon in Kyrgyzstan, and perhaps the more westernized Kyrgyz people,
who might be easier to identify with for viewers of PBS, are not very likely to
be kidnapped. However, I want to argue that while these depictions may be realistic,
they may not always be relevant. This is an important distinction
to make in these situations. There are two ways in which we are influenced by
news. First of all, the facts that we learn from the news can affect the way we
think about things. But, secondly, the way that news reports frame stories
is just as important as, if not more important than the facts presented. While
the pictures of rural Kyrgyz people we can find on the PBS website may be
representative of what things really look like, the question that really needs
to be asked is what purpose these photographs serve. To me it appears that they
only serve to exoticize Kyrgyz people, and thus provide a way to separate the
situations from Western readers of the article from those of the subjects of
the article.
The Newsweek article
studied relies even more heavily on photography than the PBS report. It too
contains many pictures of people in traditional clothing, but now the pictures
are more focused on people than landscapes. They are mostly taken indoors, and
in all but one of the photographs, the subject of the picture is a person or
group of people. These photographs mostly depict people in traditional dress,
just as on the PBS website. However, what is most striking about the pictures
here is that the people portrayed always look dejected, with their faces
usually turned away from the camera. This is different from the representations
of the PBS website in that everything is not as clearly focused on the cultural
differences between Kyrgyzstan and the West. However, the dispirited people
depicted in the photographs do invite the viewer to think of Kyrgyz people as
victimized. This is in line with Volpp’s analysis of depictions of minority
women: they are often portrayed as victims, and as lacking in agency.
We see that the Newsweek article
too frames the suffering of Kyrgyz women in a particular way. By portraying
Kyrgyz people (women in particular) as victims, it deprives them of agency.
Again, it is certainly true that a large portion of Kyrgyz women are “victims
of their culture” in some sense, but by framing this suffering in a context
only of victimization, the essay paints a very one-dimensional picture of what
the situation of Kyrgyz women is like.
The news reports also
tend to unquestioningly take the stance that there is a “correct” culture, i.e.
the Western one, and that non-western cultures should aspire to be more
Western. This is very evident on the PBS website, which invites readers to
answer the question “Should the international community intervene when cultural
traditions clash with modern notions of women’s rights?”[8]This
makes it clear that the authors are painting a cultural hierarchy. One should
ask oneself why the “international” (presumably this means Western) community
should be intervening in Kyrgyz affairs. Certainly nobody asks whether the
international community should intervene when women are raped in the United
States, even though this is something that happens systematically.
The short documentary
film that can be viewed on the same website poses near the end the question of
the morality of bride kidnappings given that many of the abducted women end up
happy in the resulting marriage. This particular question is often portrayed as
a unique ethical problem facing the people of Kyrgyzstan. The New York
Times article I studied spends many paragraphs describing the violent
kidnapping of one woman against her will, and then ends up with a few short
sentences about how she is happy with the arrangement now. I think that these
descriptions serve to portray other cultures as particularly violent compared
to Western ones. Furthermore, by noting that there clearly is some ethical
dilemma at hand here, but not asking Kyrgyz people for their opinions, they
implicitly make the claim that it is the duty of Western people to make
judgments about the morality of events in other countries.
At this point, I think
that I have established that the portrayal of Kyrgyz women in major US media
outlets has to some extent deprived them of agency by depicting them as victims
of their culture. This is not an unusual phenomenon; Volpp discusses it in some
generality in her paper. It has also been studied in some other specific cases.
For example, Reimers describes in her paper “Representations of an honor
killing” how very much the same phenomenon has occurred in Sweden regarding
discussions of honor killings by Kurdish immigrants[9].
She comes to the conclusion, very similarly to me, that Swedish representations
of these killings contribute to a picture of Swedish culture as “superior” to
Kurdish culture. She writes that “the purported difference between ‘them’ and
‘us’ intersect with a nationalistic and colonial discourse.”[10] I
now want to look more closely at how portrayals of Kyrgyz women serve to
elevate Western culture above other cultures, and in particular describe how
this in itself can be seen as an act of violence against the women of
Kyrgyzstan.
One analysis of violence
is put forward by Patricia Hill Collins, in her paper “The tie that binds:
race, gender, US violence.” She argues that violence is often defined in a way
that benefits people who are higher up in some social hierarchy, and that the
acceptance of these definitions leads to a perpetuation of those hierarchies.[11] One
example she gives is that “American soldiers who killed people during the Gulf
war were excused and even celebrated,” whereas “civilians killing police in
inner-city neighborhoods remain vilified.”[12] From
these observations, Collins argues for a broader definition of violence, which
should better take into account the suffering of socially disadvantaged people.
She writes that violence can “be viewed as a group-based institution of abuse”[13];
this will be an important frame of reference for my analysis.
To elaborate on this
idea, we can note that even according to traditional definitions, violence can
be conceptualized as an act that limits another persons freedom, albeit usually
physically. However, from a point of view of analyzing injustices, there is no
clear reason to limit one’s definition of violence to the physical. To make a
distinction between abusive acts that are physical and ones that are not
physical does not seem entirely justified. In fact, such an approach could
possibly serve to make abuses against people in oppressed positions seem less
noteworthy than other abuses. It is frequently the case that minorities are
portrayed in a stereotypical way in the media, while people in privileged
positions can play many different roles. By claiming that media representations
cannot constitute acts of violence, we are thus supporting a definition of
violence that supports already existing hierarchies. It is in this context that
I will examine the violence implicit in US representations of Kyrgyz bride
kidnapping.
I think that it is
appropriate to apply an analysis similar to that of Patricia Hill Collins to
the reports on bride kidnapping studied here. As we have seen, the role of Kyrgyz
people in the reporting done on bride kidnapping is always limited to providing
facts and experiences, but they are never asked for their own analyses of the
culture behind bride kidnapping. This upholds a cultural hierarchy that says
that people from the West tend to be more neutral and disinterested than
non-Westerners. People from other cultures are depicted as too bound by their
culture to think rationally about moral questions, while Western people are
able to look at things from a neutral perspective, either because they somehow
are capable of diassociating themselves from their culture, or because the
culture that is there is a culture of rationality from the beginning.
Furthermore, the portrayal of Kyrgyz women as
victims rather than agents perpetuates certain Western ideas about “other
cultures.” Volpp writes the following about the distinction between agents and
victims.
The binary assumption that women in the West have
choice, and that those in immigrant and Third World contexts have none, in part
reflects the limits of our language in describing choice: Either one is an
agent, or one is a victim. This binary also reflects historical representations
of the West as the site of rugged individualism, and the East as the repository
of passivity and culture.[14]
That is, the portrayal of Kyrgyz women as victims upholds a
long-standing tradition in the West of denying non-Western women agency. This
is certainly an act of violence in the sense of Collins; it is a systematic
abuse of a large group of underprivileged people. It is interesting to note
that the way that women in non-Western cultures are portrayed as victims of
their culture stands in stark contrast to the way that violence against Western
women is portrayed in the United States. A complaint often raised about US news
coverage of rapes in the United States is that they fail to take into account
cultural conditions that are conducive to rape.[15]
In light of this
analysis of violence, I hope that it is clear how the representations studied
here indeed do constitute an act of violence against Kyrgyz people, and Kyrgyz
women in particular. Geopolitically, rural Kyrgyz people are typically not in a
position of power, and the way that they are portrayed here only perpetuates
this. They are portrayed as people to feel sorry for, not as people to identify
with, or as people with their own agency.
I now want to discuss
how news reporting can be transformed to depict the situation of women in
Kyrgyzstan without painting them in a way that furthers Western cultural
dominance over the East. Recall that there are two main aspects to the way that
someone is represented in the news: the facts given, and the way that these
facts are framed to give a complete picture of the situation. Of course there
is a large amount of overlap between these two aspects; the choice of facts
presented clearly contributes to the way that reports frame people. That is,
for any given event, there are many facts about the event that can be presented
in the news, and only a small number of these facts can be given. In any case,
what needs to be changed is the framing of the reports. All of the news
articles I have read do report accurate facts (to my knowledge), and I do think
that it is important for people in the United States to be aware of the
situation of women in Kyrgyzstan, but I do not think that the way that the
women are portrayed represents them fairly. One way to ensure that women are
portrayed fairly is to report through a transveral lens.
Transversal politics is
a form of analysis which “emphasizes coalition building that takes into account
the specific positions of ‘political actors.”’[16] Handrahan
writes about transversalism that it “involves maintaining a starting/standing
point/perspective coupled with the flexibility to recognize, but not
homogenize, other starting/standing point/perspectives.”[17] We
want an analysis that firmly acknowledges that all people are different in
their backgrounds, their points of view, their identites, and so on, while
simultaneously allowing for empathy between people with different backgrounds.
One way to achieve such an empathy is by emphasizing abstract similarities
between different people’s positions, while still acknowledging the potentially
large differences between them as well. I believe that such an approach would
be well-suited for descriptions of bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan.
There are many abstract
similarities between Kyrgyz bride kidnapping and the problems that affect women
in the United States. For example, one pervasive problem in the United States
is sexual assault on university campuses.[18] Abstractly,
I think that there are many similarities between bride kidnapping and campus
rape. First of all, they are both acts of violence that affect mostly women.
Furthermore, the victims (and perpetrators) are often young, and there is often
alcohol involved.[19] Finally,
the perpetrators are often acquaintances of the victims. Note that I do not
mean to equate bride kidnapping with campus rape. What I want to show is that
US media outlets can and should emphasize that there are similarities between
the sexual violence faced by young women in Kyrgyzstan and in the United
States, while still acknowledging the (vast) differences. Such an approach
would serve to humanize Kyrgyz women, instead of victimizing them.
We now turn to the
discussion of the ethics of bride kidnapping from earlier. We noted that one of
the questions often brought up in reports on bride kidnapping is how to
approach the phenomenon given that many of the resulting marriages actually end
up happy. It is often portrayed as a cultural curiosity that Kyrgyz women can
choose to be happy with people who have committed acts of violence against
them. However, I would argue that there are certain similarities between this
and the phenomenon of women who choose to remain with their abusive spouses in
the United States. Again, there are many differences between the specific
situation of spousal abuse in the United States and bride kidnapping in
Kyrgyzstan, but perhaps by looking at the similarities we can understand better
the situations of women both in the United States and in Kyrgyzstan, and more
importantly, it would allow for more connection and empathy between the women
in the different situations.
Of course, there are
certain aspects of bride kidnapping that are not quite analogous with any
phenomena in the United States. For example, we have noted that some reporters
view the increased amount of bride kidnappings since the fall of the Soviet
Union as a way for a Kyrgyz national identity to assert itself. This might be
difficult to relate to a US context. However, we must keep in mind that the
important thing is not necessarily to paint all violence against women as being
similar or even analogous, but just to always remind people that foreign women
cannot (and should not) be viewed entirely as victims without agency, and that
while their situation is different from those of the audience of the news, it
can still be understood and related to the personal lives of the audience. We
must also keep in mind that there is no one “Western” experience; there are many
types of people in the West who face many different kinds of oppression. Still,
by connecting the suffering of Kyrgyz women to suffering that is at least
geographically closer, if nothing else, to the audience of the news, we can
hope to evoke at least some additional understanding.
We have seen that the
way that bride kidnapping is reported on in the US media is flawed in many
ways. It depicts violence against Kyrgyz women in a way that portrays Kyrgyz
women only as victims, and not as agents. This is a common feature of media
portrayals of non-Western women as well as Western minority women both
historically and in the present. The result of these portrayals is a
preservation of a cultural hierarchy that places the West at the top, and
regards other cultures as inferior and oppressive. This stands in contrast to
the way Western media depicts violence against women occurring in the West,
with Western perpetrators. In order to portray the people of Kyrgyzstan in a
more respectful way, we must turn to a transversal reporting of their
situation, and try to connect their lives to the lives of Western people.
Works Cited
Akiner, S. (1997). Between tradition and modernity: the dilemma
facing contemporary Central
Asian women. In M. Buckley (Ed.), Post-Soviet Women: From
the Baltic to Central Asia (pp. 261–304). Cambridge University Press.
Armstrong, E. A.,
Hamilton, L., & Sweeney, B. (2006). Sexual assault on campus: A multilevel,
integrative approach to party rape. Social Problems, 53(4),
483–499.
Collins, P. H. (1998). The tie that binds: race, gender and US
violence. Ethnic and Racial Studies,
21(5), 917–938.
FRONTLINE/World: Kyrgyzstan - The Kidnapped Bride. (2004, March).
http://www.pbs.org/
frontlineworld/stories/kyrgyzstan/thestory.html.
Handrahan, L. (2004).
Hunting for women: bride-kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan. International
Feminist Journal of Politics, 6(2), 207–233.
Hayashi, N. (2013, November 4). Grab and Run: Kyrgyzstan’s Bride
Kidnappings. Newsweek.
Reimers, E. (2007).
Representations of An Honor Killing: Intersections of discourses on culture,
gender, equality, social class, and nationality. Feminist Media Studies, 7(3),
239–255.
Smith, C. S. (2005, April 30). Abduction, often violent, a Kyrgyz
wedding rite. The New York
Times.
Volpp, L. (2001). Feminism versus multiculturalism. Columbia
Law Review, 101(5), 1181–1218.
Werner, C. (2009). Bride
abduction in post-Soviet Central Asia: marking a shift towards patriarchy
through local discourses of shame and tradition. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, 15(2), 314–331.
Worthington, N. (2008).
Progress and persistent problems: Local TV news framing of acquaintance rape on
campus. Feminist Media Studies, 8(1), 1–16.
[2] Werner, 2009, p. 316.
[3]
Handrahan, 2004, p. 209.
[4] Handrahan, 2004.
[5] Handrahan, 2004.
[6]
Werner, 2009.
[7] Akiner, 1997 says that
after the dissolution of the Soviet union some Kyrgyz women “feel the need to
return to their ‘authentic’ roots; Handrahan, 2004 writes that bride kidnapping
“has come to be understood as a fundamental ‘Kyrgyz tradition’ neither imposed
nor transported but home-grown on the jailoos
(mountain pastures) of the Tien Shen mountain range.” 8Volpp,
2001, p. 1186-1187.
[8] “FRONTLINE/World:
Kyrgyzstan - The Kidnapped Bride,” 2004.
[9] Reimers, 2007.
[10] Reimers, 2007, p. 251.
[11] Collins, 1998.
[12] Collins, 1998, p. 922.
[13] Collins, 1998, p. 921.
[14] Volpp, 2001, p. 1211.
[15] Worthington, 2008, p. 13
gives an example of even a relatively “progressive” report on a rape which
still “focused so much on the specifics of the scandal without reference to
broader social structures that facilitate violence against women.
[16] Collins, 1998, p. 930.
[17] Handrahan, 2004, p. 211.
[18] See Armstrong, Hamilton,
and Sweeney, 2006 for an in-depth analysis of rape at one university.
[19] Handrahan, 2004 gives an
analysis of the importance of vodka in Kyrgyz bride kidnappings, and Armstrong
et al., 2006 discusses in depth how alcohol shapes sexual assault on US
university campuses.
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