In 2010, ethnic violence broke out in Kyrgyzstan, the worst in decades. Displacing hundreds of thousands of Uzbeks to refugee camps along the Uzbekistan border, the clashes resulted in hundreds of deaths and an uncounted number of sexual assaults. On one Osh street alone, Kyrgyz men sexually assaulted more than ten Uzbek women and girls – some pregnant, some as young as twelve years old. The underlying causes of the violence remain disputed, with some citing ethnic or class tension and others suggesting political fallout from a recent presidential coup, but ultimately sides divided along the faultline of ethnicity. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights thus urged an end to the ‘indiscriminate killings, including of children, and rapes [that] have been taking place on the basis of ethnicity’.

Statements like these, common in times of crisis and mass violence, subsume violence against women under a broader category of violence against an ethnic, political, or religious group, thereby obscuring the underlying histories of gender hierarchy and gender-based violence. For example, like many other countries, Kyrgyzstan is host to pervasive domestic violence even in times of relative peace. Although years of lobbying by women's rights groups resulted in the 2003 Law on Social-Legal Protection from Domestic Violence, as of 2006, enforcement remained limited at best, for reasons ranging from law enforcement apathy, to subscription to the prevailing paradigm of gender hierarchy, to the perceived failure of the law to promulgate and publicize a clear enforcement mechanism.

Kyrgyzstan is also home to the custom of ala kachuu (roughly: ‘grab and run’), which is the practice of ‘taking a woman or girl against her will through deception or force and using physical or psychological coercion to force her to marry one of her abductors’. The custom, which predates the twelft h century arrival of Islam in the region, is practised across Central Asia to varying degrees. A holdover from the days of marauding tribes who would steal women from rivals, ala kachuu now allows men to avoid the rigors of courtship and an often expensive ‘bride price’. As if the underlying gender hierarchies were not selfevident, one Kyrgyz graduate student explained that ‘[m]en steal women to show that they are men’.