Sixteen-year-old Marat pauses, anticipating his moment to take the stage. He’s performed in Youth Theater for Peace [8] skits in Kyrgyzstan before, but today he’s doing something different: he’s playing the part of a girl.
The play, like many others performed through the Youth Theater for Peace [8] program (YTP), tackles a tough community conflict: bride-napping. Bride-napping [9] is a widespread practice in Kyrgyzstan in which a would-be groom, often assisted by friends and relatives, captures a young woman and takes her to his family’s home to convince her to marry him. This tradition has experienced a resurgence since the fall of the Soviet Union, and while women occasionally consent to it (a socially-acceptable method to circumvent familial, ethnic or financial barriers to formal marriage), many bride-nappings are non-consensual. Abductees may suffer from psychological and physical coercion, including rape, and the practice poses significant threats to young women’s personal safety and freedom of movement.
In the performance Marat is about to take part in, an aspiring college student is bride-napped and held against her will at the home of a young man under parental pressure to find a wife. Marat is an audience member, but he has elected to “intervene” in this skit he’s just observed, taking on the role of the main character and attempting to alter the play’s outcome by departing from the original script. The other YTP actors on stage are prepared for interventions like this; YTP’s Drama for Conflict Transformation methodology is designed to facilitate dialogue between performers and audience-members on the conflict issues performers include in their skits.
In the role of the abducted bride, Marat defies threats from the mother-in-law character, escapes from the would-be groom, and returns home. Despite his valiant performance, the girls in the audience aren’t convinced. They object that it would be inconceivable and immoral for a girl to rebuke an elder, that returning home would bring shame and disgrace upon her family, and that Marat’s attempt to escape probably wouldn’t work in the real world.
Getting boys and men involved in the pursuit of gender equality is critical for combating for bride-napping and other forms of violence against women, which are often perpetrated by males and sometimes used to define “what it means to be a man” in a given cultural context. Recent research by the International Center for Research on Women [10] found that while a majority of men worldwide accept gender equality in the abstract, many do not know how to act on these beliefs or feel they cannot because of cultural constructions of masculinity in their communities.
Although Marat’s proposed resolution of the skit’s conflict was deemed implausible by fellow YTP participants, his intervention inspired a lively discussion about the complexities of tradition and community responsibility, and it ultimately fulfilled YTP’s goal of helping participants step into the shoes of those of other backgrounds and perspectives. Providing girls and boys with opportunities to address issues like bride-napping together can help them gain an appreciation for the challenges each other face, and inspire home-grown solutions to their communities’ most pressing issues. Culture is never static, and through techniques like YTP that facilitate dialogue, youth can use their new perspectives to practice defining their own futures and the future of their communities.
The Youth Theater for Peace [8] program is implemented by IREX [11]and funded by USAID [12].