By Courtney Rose Brooks, Amina Umarova
Dagmara burst into tears when her son told her that he had kidnapped a teenage girl to force her to marry him.
It was in August of 1999, shortly before the start of the second Chechen war, when her son abducted one of his classmates -- a pretty girl with big blue eyes, curly hair, and a disarming smile.
"Three of his friends forced her into a car while she screamed that she didn't want to get married to anyone -- that she wanted to become a businesswoman rather than stay at home like a hen," Dagmara, 48, said.
When Louisa's aunt arrived to speak with the girl, she said the kidnapping was the teenager's own fault because she chose to wear a dress that day -- instead of the pants she usually wore. The families negotiated, and within a few hours had agreed the couple would marry.
"Eleven years have passed but I still cannot express how I felt when my son told me… It was so sudden. I could not stop crying when I saw this tiny 16-year-old girl," Dagmara, who didn't provide her last name for safety reasons, said.
Bride abductions are an endemic phenomenon in the Caucasus and Central Asia. In Chechnya alone, rights activists say as many as one in four marriages begins with the woman being kidnapped and forced to wed against her will.
