Seven years ago Gazbubu Babayarova was kidnapped by one of her closest friends, who was a medical student. He did not accept her protestations that she did not want anything more than friendship and entered into an arrangement with both their parents to kidnap her. Early one morning he stopped by her house in Bishkek with a friend and offered to give her a lift to work in his car. Instead of driving to her office, the car veered off in another direction. When she asked what was going on, they just laughed. "I felt that I was like a fish caught in a net. I was horrified, worried and very angry," Ms Babayarova recalls. Soon she arrived at his home in a small village, where around seven of his female family members were waiting for her, including both grandmothers.
She was only able to escape after promising to marry him the following autumn. When she got home - with no intention of marrying him - her own family started to telephone her, saying she had brought shame on them for abandoning the deal.
Meanwhile, in Somalia, a 14 year old girl gathers up money and leaves her house to go to the store for milk and meat for her mother. As she begins to enter the market a car with darkened windows skids to a stop, the back door is flung open and she's dragged inside by men she's never seen before. Inside the car a man says to the driver "this is my new wife, we just got engaged". Her money is stolen and she's locked away and forced to become the wife of the leader of the terrorist group known as Al-Shabaab. Only after her kidnapper had been killed in a shootout was she able to escape to Kenya where, now 15 years old, she is raising the son of the man who bridenapped and raped her. This young girl describes her story by saying "He beat me and locked me up for one and a half months in a house. He said, 'If you talk I'll kill you'. I was so afraid that I accepted. Even when I wanted to go to the toilet, he escorted me. He wouldn't let me do anything on my own. He also used force to get me to have sex with him; he tied each of my legs with rope so they were apart. It was every night at midnight."
This despicable experience is echoed, not only throughout the country of Somolia but, Bride kidnapping, or "bridenapping", happens in at least 17 countries around the world, from China to Mexico to Russia to southern Africa. In each of these lands, there are communities where it is routine for young women and girls to be plucked from their families, raped and forced into marriage. In certain regions of Kyrgyzstan "bridenapping" accounted for nearly 80% of all the marriages. In six different villages almost half of the 1322 registered marriages were due to "bridenapping" and over a third of them were non-consensual (Most people in Kyrgyzstan view the practice as a tradition rather than a crime. There is such a thing as "consensual" bridenapping, where the bride agrees to be taken as part of a custom). However, a more violent version of this "tradition" has grown in the 21st century. In fact, earlier this year, two 20-year-old students committed suicide after falling victim to bridenapping. The deaths of Venera Kasymalieva and Nurzat Kalykova prompted demonstrations in their home province of Issyk-Kul, but little has changed.
The men who are able to get away with the crime in Somalia thanks to a toxic combination of lawlessness, extreme Islamist values that give women no rights, and the shame of lost virginity are able to because there is little awareness of these crimes and even less police investigations into them. In fact, despite bridenapping being a criminal offence carrying a maximum three-year jail term, very few cases are brought, and most of those who are prosecuted get away with a negligible fine.
The United Nations has been aware of stories like Asana's and Ms Babayarova's - not to mention ones with much more tragic endings - for decades, but admits that little has been done to tackle it. Aminata Toure, chief of the Gender, Human Rights and Culture branch of the UN Population Fund, said: "What we really need is more research to come up with the level of the problem. For something to be registered as a crime, it has to be reported; that's the problem, because it's often seen as a cultural practice and not a crime. When it's not perceived as a crime, it becomes even harder for this practice to be registered as one.
"These are issues that sometimes it is problematic even to talk about. The bottom line is that women are considered as commodities - both by the husband who takes them and their own families who accept a deal."