Forced Marriage and Birth Outcomes

Abstract

Abstract:We study the impact of bride kidnapping, a form of marriage practiced in Central Asia and elsewhere, on infant birth weight. Considerable debate exists as to whether kidnapping is merely ritualized elopement, or whether it involves bride coercion. To the extent that it is non-consensual, we expect adverse consequences from such marriages, working through poor spousal matching quality and subsequent psychosocial stress. Remarkable survey data from rural Kyrgyzstan enable us to explore differential outcomes for kidnapped women. We apply several estimation models, including an IV estimation in which we instrument kidnapping among young women with the district-level prevalence of kidnapping among older women and an OLS regression with district fixed effects. Our findings indicate that children born to kidnapped mothers are of a substantially lower birth weight than children born to mothers who are not kidnapped. We further find less positively assorted mating among spouses in kidnapped marriages than in other types and higher divorce rates among kidnapped women. These findings have important implications for children's long-term development; they also discredit the ritualized-kidnapping-as-elopement view.

How marriages based on bride capture differ: Evidence from Kyrgyzstan

“…We strongly dispute this claim. As we document in Becker, Mirkasimov, and Steiner (2017), infants born to Kyrgyz women in such marriages are significantly lighter at birth -between 40 and 200 grams, depending on the specification -than those offspring of other marriages. We argue that this birth-weight loss is a sign of increased psychological stress experienced by women who have to live with a partner they did not choose.…”

“…In many places, this so-called bride capture no longer seems common, but it is still practiced in such countries as Armenia, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and South Africa. In Kyrgyzstan, for example, an estimated 16-24% of currently married women were captured (Becker, Mirkasimov, and Steiner 2017;Nedoluzhko and Agadjanian 2015;UNFPA 2016). Here, contemporary bride capture usually involves a potential groom and his male friends taking a young woman into a car and transporting her to his home.…”

School attendance: demographic differences and the effect of a primary school meal programme in Kyrgyzstan

“…It is to a large extent similar to the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Surveys, with some modifications and additional modules. The LiK data are widely used by regional and international scholars to address migrationrelated issues (Chakraborty et al, 2015;Guelfi & Sattar, 2015), gender problems (Barrientos & Kudebayeva, 2015;Becker et al, 2017), and other economic and social issues (Bruck et al, 2014;Esenaliev & Kisunko, 2015) in the Central Asian region.…”

Bride kidnapping and gendered labor migration: evidence from Kyrgyzstan

“…Forced marriage is an alternative to the more common love and arranged marriages, in which the bride and groom have the opportunity to consent to their potential marriage partner, whether they select the potential partner themselves or the partner is selected by relatives or matchmakers (Becker, Mirkasimov, and Steiner 2017). We focus on a particularly dramatic form of forced marriage: bride kidnapping.…”

“…Both Kyrgyz and international researchers have analysed the practice and meanings of ala kachuu, including the history of the practice, the extent to which it constrains women's autonomy, and its relationship to discourses of nationalism. However, ways in which families formed through kidnapping may be different than families formed through voluntary marriage are only beginning to be explored (Becker, Mirkasimov, and Steiner 2017;Steiner and Becker 2019).…”