My hostage and my wife

The men in Georgia have an uncomplicated attitude to courtship. If they want to marry a girl, they take her by force - with society's approval.

Before I left for the Caucasus, various friends patted me on the back, gave me a wink and said: "Hey, don't get kidnapped." I would reply: "Ho, ho, of course not, not going anywhere dangerous y'know." Which, of course, I wasn't. Not to Chechnya, where the kidnapping of aid workers has led most foreigners to leave, not to Dagestan either, where the mountain tribes have been waving guns at each other. I was going to Georgia, their nice, civilised neighbour, famous for its soft wines, beautiful women and polyphonic song. No kidnapping there, ho, ho; of course not.

A couple of nights later I was sitting at a cafe in central Tbilisi. After a couple of soft wines I turned to Nana, the nearest beautiful woman, who, coincidentally enough, appeared to be singing polyphonically, and said: "Ho, ho, don't suppose you have ever been kidnapped?"

"Well, yes, I have actually," Nana replied airily, as if I had asked her whether she had ever tried Coca-Cola. "I met a man at my grandmother's funeral, he only met me once but he decided that he was in love with me. So a few days later he tried to force me into his car. I shouted, and luckily some passers-by pulled me away, and he drove off." "But why did he want to kidnap you?" Nana shot me a look and said: "So that I would be his wife."

Both temporally and geographically Georgia is in a peculiar position. It is the far edge of Christian Europe and, while it is passionately orthodox in its religion, many of its values have a distinctly Central Asian weight; women do not smoke in the street, sleep with boyfriends or leave home until they get married; even kissing is regarded as risque. For a girl to be known to be sexually active before marriage brings shame on both her and her family. However, since independence, Georgian women have had five years of MTV, Russian Cosmo and American films. Consequently, not only are they aware that premarital sex is a Western norm, but they also dress like movie stars and dance like fiends. In many respects, they are thoroughly modern women, educated and independent in spirit. Even in poor rural areas Georgian girls give off a self-confident sass, teetering down the road in Spice Girl platforms and perfect hairdos.

It turned out that three of the five women I was with had been victims of attempted kidnapping before moving to Tbilisi, and two had been sexually assaulted.

Dodo Roinishvili, the director of Oxfam Tbilisi, runs a number of projects for women and is supporting a programme to combat kidnapping in the western town of Zugdidi. "Kidnapping is a kind of tradition, although I do not mean this in the positive sense of the word," she said. "There are two kinds of kidnapping: first, in those instances where parents do not approve of a marriage, the kidnapping is like a technicality, an excuse for elopement. But in the worst case a man, or rather a boy - it mainly happens among young people - kidnaps a girl who has no feeling for him. He gets her into a car. His friends are with him. Then he says he is kidnapping her and they are going somewhere, a summer house or an empty flat. Sometimes she starts screaming or crying, but they will have locked the doors. When he and his friends have brought her to the place she will try to convince him to let her go; his friends might get scared and will not use force. But if they are drunk or whatever, then sometimes the boy will rape her, and she will have no way out and must stay." In other words, she must marry her rapist.

In much of rural Georgia such actions are sanctioned by society; indeed the boy will make no attempt to hide his intentions before the kidnap: "It is already known to the people of her area because the boy will do his best to let everyone know that he is kidnapping the girl; even if nothing happens and she comes back, society views her as being kidnapped and no longer a virgin; this is traditional."

Police corruption is legendary in Georgia (and understandable, since they rarely receive wages) so it does the girl little good to press charges. Police and healthcare workers receive no training to deal with such cases. As Keti, another aid worker, put it: "A girl can go to the police, but they will look at her and say: `Every day we deal with decapitated bodies; why are you bothering us with this? Stop causing embarrassment to your family and go back to your husband.' "

In a country where women dramatically outnumber men, it seems strange that men resort to such violent tactics, but this may explain why kidnapped women are seen as having little grounds for complaint. Most of my young female friends in Tbilisi are focused on husband-catching; a single woman is a burden on her family, after all, and by the age of 24 she is regarded as dangerously on the shelf. "No question, it is a gender issue," said Dodo. "The important thing is that this is never considered a criminal act. Society believes a man has the right to do this if he loves her; that, after some time, she will fall in love with him, it will naturally happen."

Such practice is mainly confined to the rural areas, but even in the capital it is not unheard of. Last May a student at Tbilisi State University carried out the meticulously planned kidnapping of a girl in his study group. After he had taken her to his dacha, the girl's mother found out and alerted her boyfriend, and the two of them set off to find her. When they arrived in the dark, the kidnapper began shooting at the boyfriend, the girl leapt out to save him, and both were killed.