Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
When Grace Tchami started showing signs of puberty at age nine, her mother, hoping to protect her, began to torture her. At about seven o’clock every morning, her mother would take one of the heavy stone pestles used for grinding food and heat it burning hot over a charcoal fire, then press it on Grace’s breasts, attempting to flatten them.
In a small, bamboo-roofed kitchen behind the house, Grace remembers, Mama performed this procedure day after day for three months. Grace’s older brother would hold her legs so she couldn’t run away. And then, still reeling from the ordeal, Grace would be sent along to elementary school.
I met Grace, who is now 16, in this southern Nigerian town where she had traveled across the Cameroonian border to buy fabric for her mother’s sewing business. She said she is permanently scarred and still suffers from the trauma. She said her mother told her the goal was to make her less desirable to boys, and thus to kill any chance of her getting pregnant early.
And Grace is not alone. The tradition of “breast ironing” has gone on for years in Cameroon, and appears to be spreading.
In its its 2014 human rights report on Cameroon, the U.S. State Department likened “breast ironing” to the more prevalent practice of female genital mutilation. This “procedure to flatten a young girl’s growing breasts with hot stones, cast-iron pans, or bricks” has “harmful physical and psychological consequences, which include pain, cysts, abscesses, and physical and psychological scarring,” according to the report.
The United Nations says breast ironing now affects 3.8 million women around the world. While the U.S. human rights report suggested reports of the practice are “rare,” the local press in Cameroon has reported that up to 50 percent of girls undergo the very painful procedure on a daily basis.
Research in 2011 by Gender Empowerment and Development (GEED), a non-governmental organization based in Bamenda in Cameroon’s northwestern region, found that about one in four females in the country had experienced it. In about 58 percent of the cases it was mothers who performed the procedure, believing they were protecting their daughters.
Mothers began to carry out the procedure on their girls as they believed that their daughters’ breasts would expose them to the risk of sexual harassment and early pregnancies.
Girls from rich families are made to wear a wide belt, which presses the breasts and is supposed to prevent them from growing.
Breast ironing is less common in Cameroon’s northern region where the population is primarily Muslim.
As of 2011, less than one tenth of adolescent girls in the region had undergone the procedure, according to GEED statistics.
Breast ironing was hardly spoken about in the predominantly Muslim region, perhaps as a result of the high rate of early marriage, which eliminates the need to maintain illusions of a girl’s youth.
Grace became pregnant at the age of 15, but sadly lost her child during childbirth.
She said breast ironing is even more painful than childbirth, and that it did nothing to prevent her from getting pregnant before marriage.
“The whole practice was useless after all,” she said. “Rather than teach, breast ironing kills. My mother should have taught me sex education, rather she let this evil practice devastate me.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/30/they-re-mutilating-little-girls-breasts-in-cameroon-to-protect-them-from-boko-haram.html