A criminal case brought against her relatives was https://asian-date.net/central-asia/kyrgyzstan-women ongoing at the end of the year. They do not want to acknowledge the issue and do not understand the term “femicide.” If the problem is not addressed, we might witness more of such infamous local cases as the murder of Burulai at the police station and the kidnapping and murder of Aizada. One of the cases involved a husband pouring gasoline over his wife and setting her on fire. In September 2020, a 47-year-old man stabbed his wife to death for not cooking dinner that day. In June 2020, a video circulated on social media of a husband tying car tires filled with bricks to his wife’s neck while repeatedly slapping her and pouring buckets of cold water on her as a punishment. A more recent case of horrific abuse, reported in September 2021, involved a 28-year-old man torturing his pregnant wife with a red-hot iron. These two cases have not resulted in femicide but are more likely to be “unfinished femicides.” There are many more untold stories with sad endings.
A woman holds up photos of two women who were killed by their kidnappers in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on April 8, 2021. As younger people in Kyrgyzstan move to urban areas or abroad, rural areas in Kyrgyzstan are increasingly left to women. In this interview, Dr. Koichumanova talks about some of her findings and shares her views on how to expand women’s prospects in Kyrgyz society. The project has been implemented with the support of the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. For the last few years, Professor Cholpon Koichumanova has been working on a project studying the role and place of women in modern Kyrgyzstan. “There is a criminal liability for the threat of using violence that is dangerous to life and health . But criminal liability occurs only if there are sufficient grounds to fear the implementation of the threat,” she said.
- Only one in 1,500 cases of abduction results in a judicial sentence in Kyrgyzstan .
- For the last few years, Professor Cholpon Koichumanova has been working on a project studying the role and place of women in modern Kyrgyzstan.
- The UN Working Groupondiscrimination against women and girlswas created by the Human Rights Council in 2011 to identify, promote and exchange views, in consultation with States and other actors, on good practices related to the elimination of laws that discriminate against women.
- Several Kyrgyz women confirmed for us that they had agreed to be kidnapped before marriage, to uphold a tradition they see as romantic.
In April, his relatives in his family home in Balykchy were questioned and threatened with being searched. On 16 November, Altyn Kapalova, a feminist artist and writer, lost a final appeal at Bishkek City Court in her case against the State Registration Service in favour of putting matronymics instead of patronymics in the passports of her three children. The vaccination programme was delayed by a shortage of vaccines and hampered by inefficient distribution of humanitarian aid, but by September over 1 million people had had at least one vaccination. In June vaccination was made compulsory for all health workers and later for other categories, causing controversy, although sanctions for those refusing were unclear. The Council of Europe’s Venice Commission and the OSCE expressed concerns over the “overly prominent” role of the president, the weakened role of the parliament and “potential encroachments on judicial independence”. For women in the United States, students may wish to start with the Centers for Disease Control report, Safe Motherhood.
“I’ve learned from personal experience that the best way to pass laws that guarantee the rights of everyone is to get women seats at the decision making table. “Our prevention work under the Spotlight Initiative targets all levels of society, and each project helps to reinforce the changes needed to transform harmful social norms, behaviours and practices. Prevention work can sometimes feel hopeless, but it is about changing one family or one media story at a time. After the journalists had completed the course, the 17 participating media organizations and the Ministry of Culture, Information, Sports and Youth Policy co-developed and adopted a Gender Code.
Freedom of expression
Sometimes, grooms use rape or other physical violence to coerce women to consent to marriage – though that’s not the norm. The government is supporting awareness raising campaigns, and the NGO “Women Support Centre” has been working with the government to monitor the impact of the new legislation. These measures should be stepped up, along with community leaders speaking out, more legal accountability for perpetrators, and increased assistance and recourse for victims. Since Kyrgyzstan’s independence in 1991, Kyrgyz have often asserted their ethnicity and traditions as a way to distance themselves from their Soviet past and affirm the country’s independent identity. For the same reasons, incidents are underreported to the authorities, particularly if the woman stays with her abductor. Nurkyz works at the Manas International Airport border checkpoints as an officer of the Automated Border Control System .
Police registered 7,178 cases for all of 2018, more than half of which involved physical violence. Publicly available data does not specify the number of bride kidnapping cases reported or prosecuted. The government should monitor responses by law enforcement and judicial bodies to complaints of domestic violence and early and forced marriage, including the issuing and enforcement of protection orders and prosecution of cases. Widespread education and awareness-raising campaigns are needed to change behavior and combat harmful attitudes. When police left the two in a room alone together, Bodoshev stabbed Burulai multiple times and reportedly carved her initials and those of the fiancé she had intended to marry into her skin. The killing spurred public pressure to tackle bride kidnapping, a practice some in Kyrgyzstan defend as “tradition” and which persists despite criminalization and toughened legislation. Gender inequality and discrimination serve as a root cause of gender-based violence in Kyrgyzstan, a pervasive and persistent concern among human rights activists, including Bishkek Feminists Initiatives .
“The Breath of the Government on My Back”
From early childhood, Nurkyz watched her father with great interest and enthusiasm when he repaired cars, and often helped him. Later, Nurkyz decided to study engineering, successfully passed the selection test for admission to a local university, becoming the only one among her peers to successfully graduate from her studies. This website is a project of the Women Peace and Security Programme of the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom.
Early Soviet Modernization in the Lives of Kazakh Women
Farangis Najibullah is a senior correspondent for RFE/RL who has reported on a wide range of topics from Central Asia, including the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the region. She has extensively covered efforts by Central Asian states to repatriate and reintegrate their citizens who joined Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. In the rural district of Alamudun in northern Chui Province, it took one woman enduring 11 years of physical violence from her husband to finally leave him and seek a divorce. The number puts the country on track to match the more than 10,100 cases of domestic abuse recorded last year, which was a 30 percent increase from 2020. In a step in the right direction, on 20 December 2012, the Parliament approved legislation toughening the penalty for the widely-practiced custom of bride-kidnapping.