There are some insanely violent wedding ceremonies and traditions out there, to be sure, and some of them haven’t altered with the centuries.
When you think “bride kidnapping,” you probably think of a fun, staged ritual that culminates in some kind of drunken merriment.
But in modern-day Kyrgyzstan, bride abductions are real, troubling, and more than a little absurd. According to a 2013 featur
e in Newsweek: “In Kyrgyzstan, as many as 40% of ethnic Kyrgyz women are married after being kidnapped by the men who become their husbands.”
The process goes like this, the woman is “often literally dragged off the street, bundled into the car and taken straight to the man’s – where frequently the family will have already started making preparations for the wedding.”
What happens next, though, is even more bizarre: since the wedding cannot technically take place without the bride’s consent, various measures are taken to intimidate and/or “convince” her
.
Elderly female relatives of the kidnapper tear their hair, gnash their teeth, and plead with the bride to give in, and they sometimes even try to force a white scarf (which is a symbol of marriage) onto her head to shame her into accepting.
Sometimes, the girl is so terrified that she accepts simply to get out of being a frenzied family centrepiece. Other times, if she can take the hazing, she simply says no or is rescued by gallant male relatives who come and take her home (although not without being haras
sed and pleaded with themselves).
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