Stolen brides of Kazakhstan: The fightback

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

In plain sight, in a modern city, a colleague offers to drive you home after work. How would you respond? One woman in Kazakhstan accepted the lift only to find herself kidnapped or ‘stolen’ as a bride. She got away, rescued by the police, but for many Kazakh women kidnap leads to marriage. Human Rights lawyer Khalida Azhigulova reckons that thousands of women are forced into marriage each year in Kazakhstan, including many who are abducted. Some women even find that a wedding has already been arranged by the time a kidnapper gets her home. Now, after 20 years of campaigning by Khalida and other activists, legislators have passed a law making forced marriage a crime. Monica Whitlock and Roza Kudabayeva travel to Kazakhstan to meet women who have been kidnapped. This episode of The Documentary comes to you from Assignment, investigations and journeys into the heart of global events.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts.
0:07.8	One lady was trying to stop a taxi in the street to take her home from work, and there was a man
0:15.2	who liked her.
0:16.3	They were colleagues.
0:17.5	He saw her.
0:18.5	Some of his friends had a car, and he invited her, oh, please sit in the car and
0:24.4	she didn't feel any threats from him and she sat in the car but then they didn't take her to the
0:30.6	place where she wanted and the guy just told her, oh, now I will marry you and I'm taking you to my
0:36.8	house.
0:45.4	She was forced to sit in the middle between two other men who were holding her so that she would not escape. When the car was standing at some of traffic light, she opened the door,
0:51.4	she ran out, she almost escaped, but then she was pulled back into the car.
0:56.2	And then what happened next? Another driver, he was just driving behind that car, who saw that he realized that something was wrong, you know, and he started following that car.
1:06.6	And he was signaling, telling them to stop. He called the police, he said that, you know,
1:11.8	there is a woman in the car in front of me, and I think the woman needs help. Police took over,
1:18.6	they drove past, and they stopped the car, and they released her. The thing is, no one was
1:26.4	punished because that guy who kidnapped you, he actually said,
1:29.3	no, no, it was just a joke.
1:31.2	And because they didn't commit any violence, the police did not even, they actually had to close the case, and that's it.
1:43.3	Almaty, the biggest city in Kazakhstan, is a modern metropolis of skyscrapers, shops and busy highways.
1:50.5	Yet in plain sight, just outside the city, a group of men got together to apparently kidnap a young woman in order to marry her to one of them,
1:59.4	and the case didn't even come to court.
2:02.7	But things might be starting to change. In September, Kazakhstan introduced a law, making it
	...

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