Bride kidnapping and gendered labor migration: evidence from Kyrgyzstan

ABSTRACT

Because the decision to migrate is a product of gendered negotiations within households, households formed through forced marriage may have different migration strategies than households formed through voluntary marriage. In Kyrgyzstan, we anticipate two possible effects of the traditional practice of bride kidnapping on migration. Households headed by a kidnap couple may be more cohesive and patriarchal, facilitating men’s labour migration and remittance-sending. Alternately, women may use migration to escape such households. We test these two hypotheses using a sample of 1,171 households in rural Kyrgyzstan. Kidnap households are more likely to include women migrants, compared to other households. Kidnap households are also more likely to be receiving remittances, even when controlling for migrant household members. However, traditional beliefs about kidnapping are negatively associated with men’s and women’s migration. While higher levels of remittance receipt among kidnap households resembles the unified, patriarchal households envisioned in the New Economics of Labour Migration, it also appears that women use labour migration as a means to escape patriarchal constraints. We demonstrate that forced marriage in Kyrgyzstan plays a larger social role than is often believed, and highlight a new pathway through which gendered power dynamics can shape household migration strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Forced marriage
• households
• labour migration
• gender
• Kyrgyzstan

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to the people of the Alay Rayon of Osh Oblast in Kyrgyzstan for participating in this study. Appreciation is extended to Christian Scott, Geoffrey Henebry, Kamilya Kelgenbaeva, Myrzagul Mamadiyarova, Cholpon Dzhumagulov, and Asylbek Aidaraliev for their assistance in field work and data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In addition to the variables described, we also tested for interactions between amount of income and type of income, but none of the interactions improved the model fit.

2 Other studies of migration have found non-linear relationships between household resources and migration. We tested for a nonlinear relationship between household per capita income and migration, and found no evidence for either men’s or women’s migration.

3 Specifically, we tested average village income, prevalence of land ownership in the village, and prevalence of bride kidnapping at the village level as potential instruments, but all produced F-statistics of <6 in first-stage models, indicating that they are very weak instruments.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Award # NNX15AP81G), the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Multistate Research Project #PEN04623 (Accession #1013257), the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Award # P2C HD041025), the Social Science Research Institute of Pennsylvania State University, and the Institutes of Energy and the Environment of the Pennsylvania State University.