Central Asia Doesn’t Take Domestic Violence Seriously

Central Asia has a domestic violence problem. Laws on paper regarding domestic violence are not implemented and support structures for victims are inadequate. Male-dominated governments and security services fail to take domestic violence seriously and as a result the region’s women suffer.

In a recent report examining domestic violence in Tajikistan, Human Rights Watch “found ongoing gaps in police and judicial responses to domestic violence, including refusing to investigate complaints, failing to issue or enforce protection orders, and treating domestic violence as a minor offense.”

The report, based on interviews with 80 people, including 55 female domestic violence survivors from Tajikistan, mirrors news reports and in-depth studies of domestic violence across Central Asia over the last several years. The region lags behind global standards when it comes to legal provisions and suffers from ingrained societal attitudes which predispose the authorities to not take domestic violence seriously.

Little Data and Flimsy Laws on Paper

The states of Central Asia use a patchwork of legal mechanisms regarding domestic violence, but not all have specific domestic violence laws. Regional governments fail to systematically gather data regarding domestic violence, allowing them to downplay its prevalence for lack of numbers proving otherwise.

Tajikistan passed its first domestic violence law in 2013. But the law – officially the Law on the Prevention of Violence in the Family – did not label domestic violence specifically as a crime, nor did it define a “family.” Thus, a woman in an unregistered marriage would still need to push for charges against an abusive husband or in-laws under the standard criminal code statutes regarding assault. As Human Rights Watch notes, the law did have some positive aspects: it recognized the rights of victims to legal, medical, and psychosocial assistance; provided for the registering of cases and obtaining protection orders; and it raised awareness of the issue.

Other Central Asian states are further behind than Tajikistan on the legal aspect of confronting domestic violence. Uzbekistan, for example, does not yet have a specific law regarding domestic violence. In 2010 concluding observations, the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) noted not only a lack of data on domestic violence but “the absence of a specific law protecting women and the lack of prosecution and punishment of perpetrators of domestic violence.” In Uzbekistan’s subsequent review, in 2015, by the CEDAW, the committee lamented that “several bills with an important bearing on women’s rights, such as that on equal rights and opportunities for men and women and that on violence in the family, have been pending for many years.”

A Private Matter

A common theme across all CEDAW reports regarding Central Asia is the consideration of domestic violence as a “private matter.” As such, there is an inherent bias against bringing domestic violence issues to the attention of the authorities, even when there are legal mechanisms equipped to deal with such complaints. And when families and the authorities become involved, as the Human Rights Watch report notes in Tajikistan, there’s often pressure put on the victim to deal with the issue via mediation, rather than filing a criminal complaint.

In Kyrgyzstan, for example, CEDAW’s 2015 concluding observations noted that “cases of violence against women are underreported, as it is considered a private matter and is taken mainly to elders’ (aksakals) courts…” In Uzbekistan, “cases are taken mainly to local bodies known as the mahalla for reconciliation.”

Kazakhstan has arguably the most robust legal structures concerning domestic violence, but lacks statutes on stalking and has a regressive definition of rape, limited to “penatrative vaginal intercourse” only and relegated to a “moderate” crime, despite its introduction into the state’s law in 1997 as a “serious” crime. Kazakhstan, CEDAW wrote in 2014, suffers from a “persistence of some forms of harmful practices and traditions and patriarchal attitudes and deep-rooted stereotypes regarding the roles and responsibilities of women and men in the family and in society, in particular those portraying women as caregivers.”

In Tajikistan, according to CEDAW’s 2018 concluding observation report, 97 percent of men (and 72 percent of women) “believe that a woman must tolerate violence to keep a family together.”

The Patriarchy

Central Asia’s states are patriarchies. A mythos inherited from the Soviet Union underscores a equality of the sexes not actually present in the governments of the region. While not necessarily directly correlated to how a society deals with issues like domestic violence – which disproportionately, though not exclusively, affect women – one measure of women’s power in a society is their prevalence in its government.

According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the lower chamber of Kazakhstan’s parliament, the Mazhilis, seats just 29 women out of 107 seats (27.1 percent); Kyrgyzstan’s parliament sits 23 women out of 120 members (19.1 percent); Tajikistan’s sits only 12 women among the 63-member Majlisi Namoyandogon (19 percent); and the legislative chamber of Uzbekistan’s Oliy Majlis sits 24 women out of 150 in the chamber (16 percent).

In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, at present, there are individual women in positions of power. The chair of the Kazakh Senate is a woman, but that woman is Dariga Nazarbayeva, the daughter of Kazakhstan’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. This summer, Uzbekistan’s Senate received its first female chair -- Tanzila Kamolovna Norbaeva. Norbaeva had served as a deputy prime minister and head of the Women’s Committee. The country will hold parliamentary elections in late December and the percentage of women may rise. Kyrgyzstan had the region’s only female president, Interim President Roza Otunbayeva in 2010-2011.

Individual women attaining high position cannot change a society that accepts domestic violence as normal. The honoring of women as caregivers in Central Asia -- as illustrated in grand celebrations every March for International Women’s Day, a state holiday across the region -- locks them into a subservient role, even in government.

The Police

Central Asia’s security services are heavily male and successive reports have found them unresponsive to women seeking to file criminal complaints against their husbands. As the Human Rights Watch report highlighted, police in Tajikistan often neglect to inform women of the resources available or the laws applicable. Instead, women are often encouraged to engage in mediation with their abusers, typically husbands but also in-laws with which married women in Tajikistan often live.

In 2018, Kyrgyzstan witnessed one of the most horrific endings to a so-called bride kidnapping when 20-year-old Burulai Turdaaly Kyzy was murdered by a 29-year-old man inside of a police station. The man had tried abducting her once before and she escaped, as she intended to marry a different man. After succeeding on a second attempt, Turdaaly Kyzy’s father called the police to report the kidnapping. He spoke to her on the phone after she was detained with her kidnapper, but when he arrived at the police station she was dead.

As RFE/RL reported, “When her father arrived at the police precinct, officials said that Turdaaly Kyzy and her abductor had been allowed by investigators to be alone in a room together, for unknown reasons...Nazira Imangazieva, a spokeswoman for district police, said officers broke into the room after hearing sounds of a fight. Kojonaliev [the father] said the attacker had not only stabbed Turdaala but carved into her body her initials and that of her fiancé.”

The episode rocked Kyrgyzstan; Turdaaly Kyzy’s face now glances down from a mural in Bishkek. Kyrgyzstan already had laws against bride kidnapping on the books, but such incidents continue to occur because the authorities do not take the issue, and the risks, seriously.