WHEN I FIRST arrived in a western district of Georgia, on the shores of the Black Sea, in 2004, I met a group of young people walking along the muddy dirt road to school. They were walking slowly, linking arms and talking and laughing together. Like teenagers anywhere, the young people were happy to talk about their own lives: tensions with parents, boredom at school, friends, and anticipation of the future.
The girls that I spoke with also mentioned their fears of being abducted for marriage.
Surprisingly, in this modern era, the abduction of girls for marriage was still considered common and acceptable. In rural Georgia, if a young man fancied a young woman, he arranged with his friends to have her abducted as she walked home from school. If she was held overnight away from her home (and often raped), her chaste reputation was lost, and she had no choice but to leave school, marry him, and move in with his family. Honor demanded it.
In rural Georgian high schools, rumors flew about who was about to be kidnapped, or who was thinking of kidnapping someone. Boys thought it was romantic and a test of bravery and manhood. Almost all the boys we spoke with said they would help a friend abduct a girl if requested, and many said they felt pressured by their friends to abduct girls. It was seen as a way of proving yourself a man, a true Georgian man.
Most girls were afraid of being abducted, but some girls I spoke with had mixed feelings, wondering if they could manage to elope with their boyfriends using a traditional kidnapping story as the cover to overcome their parents’ disapproval.
Parents also commented on the problem. One mother of a teenage girl said, “When I was in school, kidnapping girls for marriage was a big problem. In order to be a ‘real man’ and demonstrate his bravery, a boy had to kidnap a girl. But girls did not think kidnapping was romantic. They saw it for what it was—violence.”
In 2004, abduction of teenage girls was still common in rural Georgia. One 2002 study reported that up to 40 percent of rural marriages in Georgia were the result of “bride kidnapping.” The practice is common in the rest of the Caucasus region and in many parts of the world, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, the Middle East, and North Africa, though statistics are hard to find since most cases are not reported.
Lawyers and human rights activists said it was a violation of human rights and against the law in Georgia. Yet because it was rooted in culture and social custom, it was very difficult to overcome through legal channels. Many people in Georgia said that kidnapping was a cultural tradition for centuries. Kidnapping for the sake of honor was seen as an inevitable continuation of nine centuries of tradition still alive in their folk songs, dances, and poems. It was not seen as a problem; in fact, many explained it as a part of a proud cultural heritage originating in the golden age of Georgia in the 12th century.
Theater as an entry point
Georgians are known for their love of language and literature, as well as music, dance, and theater. (Their neighbors call them the people with the golden tongues.) Two local organizations that are focused on youth development decided, with the help of an international development agency, to tackle the problem of bride kidnapping by working with young people using an arts-focused strategy: interactive theater.
The youth activists chose to use traditional cultural tools because they saw the problem as culturally rooted. Knowing that their fellow Georgians greatly honor playwrights and actors, they wanted to use theater as an entry point for transformation.
They chose an interactive theater methodology called “forum theater” or “theater of the oppressed,” which uses narrative storytelling to draw public attention and action to address issues of oppression, discrimination, and violence.
A small team including high school-aged boys and girls put together the first script for the play, which they called “Closed Space.” They drafted the script in two weeks after interviewing people in the community about kidnapping. They interviewed people who had previously organized a kidnapping, those who had helped, those who watched but did not intervene, as well as the kidnap victims and their friends and families, exploring motivations, impulses, and reactions of those involved. They wrote a prototypical story stitched together from the various narratives they had collected.
The script used dialogue between characters to expose the root causes of the issue, including the cultural traditions about how men prove their virility, about how abducted women have no choice but face great stigma, and about the role that bystanders play. The script included several key decision-points where the characters make an important choice that affects the outcome.
After the script was developed, the organizers put together a small acting troupe that included two professional actors and adult and teenage volunteers from the local communities. One teenage girl who was part of the community acting troupe said, “When I read the script, I liked it and thought it was very realistic. I know girls from my school who have been kidnapped.”
The 20-minute play had seven characters and a narrator. The narrator explained the situation and the scenes, and also engaged the audience after the play ended, asking audience members for comments and suggestions about the root causes of the issue and the choices made by the characters. If someone in the audience objected to a character’s choice, the narrator invited volunteers from the audience to re-enact that scene with their own improved version of a character’s decisions and actions, by exchanging places with the actor. The play was rewound and re-enacted from many decision-points many times, each time with a different character making alternate choices.
In this way, the play had not one but many endings, chosen by the audience. Community members expressed their opinions (and everyone had an opinion!) about what should have happened. By doing so in front of their peers, on a stage, they also embodied their ideal in a physical way, usually to general applause.
Throughout these re-enactments, the narrator facilitated the community debate and asked provocative questions, but allowed communities to discuss among themselves and come to their own judgments about their values. In the public debates, community-held values of fairness and justice prevailed, even though it meant acknowledging the harm done in this centuries-old custom. This was the first time that many had heard a public declaration that girls have the right to avoid abduction or can return to her family if she is abducted.
Proving their masculinity
In one instance, an elderly woman asked to replay a key moment in the script where the kidnapper and his male friends are making plans to kidnap a girl. The woman played the character of the male friend, who this time told the kidnapper character that he did not have to kidnap a girl to prove his masculinity, by way of arguing him out of the decision.
The narrator stopped the actors and asked the audience to debate this point: Do young men feel that they need to kidnap a girl to prove their masculinity? Several people in the audience shouted their answers: No, they didn’t.
The narrator paused again, and asked the young men in the audience: Do you feel you need to kidnap a girl to prove your masculinity? One young man said, “Yes, of course.” Other young men in the audience contradicted him, saying “No, we don’t.” The first young man would not let the point go, and felt strongly that his masculine identity was at stake without a kidnapping. In front of their parents, their teachers, their siblings, their peers, and the whole community, the other young men in the audience talked him out of it. In the end, he agreed that one did not need to kidnap to prove one’s masculinity.
At the end of the discussion, the narrator summarized the values of the community that emerged in the debates: that kidnapping was not fair to girls, that boys did not need to kidnap girls to prove anything, that bystanders could easily play a role in preventing kidnapping, and that kidnapped girls should not be stigmatized and rather be welcomed back into their homes and communities.
The actors performed the play free of charge for multigenerational audiences in theaters, in the street, and on the beach hundreds of times over the course of a year. The debates about how people should behave happened onstage and off throughout that year. It seemed to change behaviors among teens and adults as well. One parent reported seeing her own son changing his perspectives and behaviors: “Earlier, he was thinking only from the point of view of the boy and not the girl,” she said. “Now he thinks of consequences for the girl. I have seen him arguing with others and trying to change their views about kidnapping.”
‘I realized I can change’
The public debates also gave people who privately had been against kidnapping permission to safely speak out against this custom in ways they had never done before. It also gave people in the community tools to know how to act when situations came up in the future. After a performance, one man reported, “When I was asked to come on the stage and play my version of the dialogue between a father and a son, I realized that I can make a change.”
The debate style of the forum theater also allowed communities to grapple with the root of the problem and thus create more durable solutions. In an exit interview after one of the performances, a man said, “I knew there were many cases of discrimination and violence against women. But I never thought about why it happened before this.”
At the start of the project, people considered kidnapping to be normal and said it was happening regularly. Three years later, tolerance for kidnapping was reduced, and girls said they had less fear of walking by themselves. Both boys and girls were actively pressuring their male friends to drop their plans for kidnapping and seeking to prevent it altogether.
There are no formal statistics comparing the number of kidnapping cases before and after the theater project, but young people surveyed at the end of the project reported that cases were dropping. One 15-year-old girl said, “Before we started performing the play, there was not a month that passed by that a girl from this area was not kidnapped. Now, kidnappings have virtually stopped—we haven’t had one here in six months.”
Young people said that they were taking action to prevent kidnappings in their villages. One young man said, “Kidnapping used to happen in this community more than two times per year. Last summer was the last one; they are decreasing. They are decreasing because ... people are better informed due to theater performances followed by discussions.”
The youth activists were proud of the changes that they saw among the young people and adults in the villages where they were working. They felt that there was more open communication between parents and children, and more open communication in their communities about topics that had been taboo.
Cultural change can and does happen. A team with tools and techniques to shine light on centuries-old habits can also find ways to help a community articulate values for themselves and find options for more supportive and equitable behaviors. A local cultural strength—in this case, a love of theater—can be used as a tool to create social change.
“Study well your culture,” a team member said, “and you will find many tools that will help you to achieve your goals.”
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