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Patriarchal Values and Their Subversion: Consensual and Nonconsensual Bride Abduction in Central Ethiopia
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This article investigates early marriage among the Oromo in Dawo District, Oromia National Regional State, Ethiopia. The research employed a mixed approach to secure relevant data. We collected primary data from the field via key informant interviews and focus group discussion. We selected key informants purposively from concerned government offices and community representatives. We collected quantitative data via questionnaire from 92 randomly selected school girls. Despite the government’s attempts to ban early marriage, the practice is still common and evolving. Parents are gradually losing the sole decision to marry their children without their consent nowadays. Yet they still have power over when and to whom they give away their daughters. Kadhaa (betrothal) and butii (abduction) are the two main ways of effecting early marriage in the study area. The main cultural reasons for which parents marry off their daughters early include securing their daughters’ future and maintaining girls’ pre-marital virginity. Virginity is valued in marriage and can be a source of honor or shame for the girls and their parents. Poverty, and particularly the current dire economic conditions in the area, coupled with an alarming level of joblessness among the youth who hold a diploma or a degree, have made the girls at school lose hope in education as a viable option for their future life and worsened early marriage in recent years. The girls themselves view marriage as an alternative life career and thus quit school for an early marriage.
The paper reports on an investigation carried out to ascertain the nature and causes of bride abduction cases in KwaZulu – Natal in South Africa. The study utilized a qualitative survey design. Focus group discussions were used to collect the data on a purposefully selected sample of thirty research participants from three purposefully selected research sites. The sample consisted of eighteen (18) women and (12) twelve men comprising of abductors, witnesses of abductions, abducted women, local chiefs, headmen, head-girls and station commanders in the local police stations. Content analysis, through emerging themes, was used in analysing the data. The study revealed that bride abduction (contemporary and negative ukuthwala) is an abuse of the custom of ukuthwala(traditional bridal abduction) which is perceived by many people to have disappeared during social transformation. However, it is still prevalent in some deep rural areas of KwaZulu – Natal. Bride abduction grossly violates women’s fundamental rights. Whereas traditional bridal abduction (ukuthwala) (to carry away with intent to marry), is a custom to many African tribes and is a global practice. The study also revealed that the nature and causes of bride abduction cases vary depending on the context where it is taking place. Furthermore, the nature and causes of bride abduction differ from that of traditional bridal abduction (ukuthwala)as a custom. The study therefore, concludes that before any hasty judgements are made about any cultural practice we need to separate what is culture from the abuse of culture. Recommendations were made that Law and Government should deal with the abuse of (ukuthwala).If the South African Government is serious about making lives of women, children, youth and the disabled better, the issue of the abuse of ukuthwala(bride abductions) should be made a priority.
Ala kachuu is the act of abducting a woman to marry her. It includes a variety of actions ranging from elopement or staged abduction for consensual marriage to violent non-consensual kidnapping. 'Kidnapping' refers to the non-consensual variety, which typically involves a young man and his friends taking a young woman by deception or force to the home of his parents or a near relative. She is held in a room until his female relatives convince her to put on the marriage scarf. If necessary she is kept over night and sometimes raped, and is thus threatened by the shame of no longer being a pure woman. This research provides evidence that more than a third of ethnic Kyrgyz women have been married by non-consensual kidnapping, and that the practice has been increasing for at least the last half century. The paper describes all forms of ala kachuu and raises ethical concerns about non-consensual kidnapping.
This article argues that systematic comparative analyses of women's strategies and coping mechanisms lead to a more culturally and temporally grounded understanding of patriarchal systems than the unqualified, abstract notion of patriarchy encountered in contemporary feminist theory. Women strategize within a set of concrete constraints, which I identify as patriarchal bargains. Different forms of patriarchy present women with distinct “rules of the game” and call for different strategies to maximize security and optimize life options with varying potential for active or passive resistance in the face of oppression. Two systems of male dominance are contrasted: the sub-Saharan African pattern, in which the insecurities of polygyny are matched with areas of relative autonomy for women, and classic patriarchy, which is characteristic of South and East Asia as well as the Muslim Middle East. The article ends with an analysis of the conditions leading to the breakdown and transformation of patriarchal bargains and their implications for women's consciousness and struggles.
A heterosexual community can be analyzed as a marketplace in which men seek to acquire sex from women by offering other resources in exchange. Societies will therefore define gender roles as if women are sellers and men buyers of sex. Societies will endow female sexuality, but not male sexuality, with value (as in virginity, fidelity, chastity). The sexual activities of different couples are loosely interrelated by a marketplace, instead of being fully separate or private, and each couple's decisions may be influenced by market conditions. Economic principles suggest that the price of sex will depend on supply and demand, competition among sellers, variations in product, collusion among sellers, and other factors. Research findings show gender asymmetries (reflecting the complementary economic roles) in prostitution, courtship, infidelity and divorce, female competition, the sexual revolution and changing norms, unequal status between partners, cultural suppression of female sexuality, abusive relationships, rape, and sexual attitudes.
The issues of gender equality and women's human rights have become major spheres of academic debate, policy and activism in virtually every corner of the globe. Violence against women, a relatively late comer to the international gender agenda, has provided a particularly critical entry point in challenging long standing gender ideologies and taboos as well as the gender biased mainstream human rights framework that kept, until recently, the gender specific abuses women experience outside of public scrutiny. The recognition of violence against women (VAW) as a human rights issue at the 1993 Vienna Human Rights Conference paved the way for the emergence of gender sensitive and inclusive standards in human rights protection. In this regard, the adoption of the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women by the United Nations General Assembly the same year and the creation of the post of Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its causes and consequences (SRVAW) in 1994 are milestone developments in expanding the boundaries of human rights and in providing both the standards and the mechanisms with which to respond to the violations of women's rights in both public and private spheres of life.
The cross-cultural method is used to examine the distribution and frequency of bride-theft, together with structural and psycho-dynamic correlates. Tylor's finding that raiding for wives occurs among matrilocal and patrilocal societies is confirmed. The hypothesis is advanced that some of the same psycho-dynamic factors are involved in both bride theft and raiding for wives.
This paper builds and tests a model of marriage as an incomplete contract that arises from asymmetric virginity premiums and examines whether this can lead to social inefficiencies. Contrary to the efficient households hypothesis, women cannot prevent being appropriated by men once they enter marriage if they command lower marriage market opportunities upon divorce. Because men cannot or do not commit to compensating women for their lower ex post marriage market opportunities, marriage is an incomplete contract. Men may seek to lower women’s ex ante “market wages” in order to induce entry into joint production. Inefficient or abusive marriages are less likely to separate. Equalizing virginity premiums may reduce domestic and non-domestic violence.
Female circumcision and prices women pay doctors to appear virgin before marriage in many countries suggest asymmetric virginity premiums continue to exist. Evidence from China and the US suggest asymmetric virginity premiums persist over economic development. Asymmetric virginity premiums are strongly positively correlated with female but not male virginity premiums. I use variation in religious upbringing to help estimate the effect of virginity premiums on gender violence in the US. The OLS relationship between virginity premiums and female reports of forced sex may be biased downwards if shame is associated with abuse and this shame is greater for women with higher virginity premiums. But the OLS relationship for males might not be biased downwards. Asymmetric virginity premiums are positively correlated with men forcing sex on women and paying women for sex. The model complements a growing empirical literature on inefficient households and human rights abuses, visible manifestations of female appropriability across time and space.
In 1974, Anthropological Quarterly published a special issue on bride theft. Since then, considerable work has been published on the practice. Drawing on my fieldwork in the Kyrgyz Republic, I assess current understandings of the practice. I argue that although functionalist and symbolic approaches to kidnapping are still relevant, it is necessary to consider kidnapping in the context of intensifying discursive competition over marriage, gender roles, and authority. In my account, kidnapping is a practice that both supports and undermines existing systems of oppression. As such, it has become a powerful engine of social change.
This paper may be read as a reclamation project. It argues, with Simone de Beauvoir, that patriarchal marriage is both a perversion of the meaning of the couple and an institution in transition. Parting from those who have given up on marriage, I identify marriage as existing at the intersection of the ethical and the political and argue that whether or not one chooses marriage, feminists ought not abandon marriage as an institution.
The apparent revival of non-consensual bride abduction in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan is somewhat surprising seventy years after the Soviet state banned the practice and introduced sweeping legislation to emancipate women. This article relies on local discourses of shame and tradition to explain changing marriage practices and to mark a shift towards greater patriarchy in post-Soviet Central Asia. Discourses of shame are mobilized by local actors in support of the popular view that a woman should 'stay' after being abducted. Women can and do resist abductions, but they risk dealing with the burden of shame. Further, in Kyrgyzstan, where bride abduction is increasingly re-imagined as a national tradition, women and activists who challenge this practice can be viewed as traitors to their ethnicity. In post-Soviet society, these discourses of shame and tradition have helped men assert further control over female mobility and female sexuality.