Structural Drivers of Child Abduction and Exploitation in Central Asia (2015–2025): A Multi-Indicator Analysis of Five Post-Soviet States

Child abduction is routinely treated as a discrete criminal event, investigated and counted one case at a time. This paper argues that, in Central Asia, such a framing obscures more than it reveals, because the conditions under which a child is abducted, forcibly married, or trafficked are shaped by durable structural features of the region rather than by isolated offenders alone. The study asks how four structural conditions—poverty and labour migration, weak child-protection and institutional capacity, gendered social norms, and rapid digital transformation—are distributed across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan between 2015 and 2025, and how they are associated with children’s vulnerability to abduction and exploitation.

Because directly comparable annual statistics on child kidnapping do not exist for all five states, the paper uses a transparent, secondary multi-indicator design that places institutional trafficking assessments, forced- and child-marriage prevalence, documented bride-kidnapping estimates, and structural indicators of migration and digital exposure side by side, without treating any one of them as a proxy for the others. Each indicator is read as a measure of a structural condition associated with vulnerability, not as a direct count of abduction.

Three findings stand out. First, the region is internally divided: internet penetration ranged from roughly 92 percent in Kazakhstan to under 42 percent in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan in early 2024, while remittances reached about 45 percent of GDP in Tajikistan, indicating sharply different structural environments. Second, the gap between recorded and estimated cases is severe; Kyrgyz authorities documented 895 bride-kidnapping cases across 2013–2018, whereas non-governmental estimates place annual abductions for marriage nearer 12,000. Third, legal reform can move official numbers dramatically without necessarily ending the underlying practice.

The paper’s contribution is to integrate security, legal, anthropological, and institutional literatures into a single structural account, to hold the concepts of kidnapping, abduction, trafficking, and exploitation analytically apart, and to treat the region’s measurement gap as a finding in its own right rather than a limitation to be apologised for. In doing so it specifies the data infrastructure that a credible structural account of child vulnerability in Central Asia would require.