A brutal tradition similar to female genital mutilation is becoming popular in Cameroon’s war zone.
Girls’ breasts are “flattened” with hot irons and stones for fear of boko haram. They believe the absence of breasts will make them less attractive to the insurgents.
In 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.
Analysts say breast ironing was initially done by women with the thought of improving a mother’s breast milk. But the thought later changed when rape and teenage pregnancy became rampant. 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.
While the tradition is widespread in Cameroon, similar practices have been documented in Nigeria, Togo, Republic of Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa.
The United Nations Population Fund has named breast ironing as one of five under-reported crimes related to gender-based violence.
Said Maryam, a Cameroonian hairdresser.
Maryam who said she had practiced breast ironing on two of her daughters, added that other methods can also be used in the practice.
Breast ironing is less common in Cameroon’s northern region where the population is primarily Muslim. But now, that may be changing as the presence of jihadist group, Boko Haram in the far north seems to be creating an upsurge in the practice.
One Cameroonian mother, who recently began breast ironing procedures on her daughter, said that she was carrying out the practice in an attempt to make her child less attractive to Boko Haram members who have been abducting adolescent girls and forcing them into marriage.
Another Cameroonian lady said she and her sister carried out breast ironing procedures on each of their two daughters, because militants were abducting girls in Maroua where they lived and they didn’t want their daughters to be taken to the Sambisa forest.
In Nigeria’s northeastern Borno State, where Boko Haram was founded, a member of the state’s main vigilante group said some girls who fled the war in the far north of Cameroon into border towns in Borno told members of his group that the breast ironing procedure was carried out on them by their parents when the jihadists began to abduct adolescent girls in the region. They said their parents ironed their breasts so they will appear less attractive to Boko Haram militants.
Some of them said they still feel terrible pain on their breasts and around the chest region.
Parents in Cameroon’s far north region have grown increasingly scared of seeing their adolescent daughters develop breasts, especially since it was widely reported in February that eight girls between the ages of 11 and 14 were abducted close to the border with Nigeria, almost the same time rumors that the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls had been married off to Boko Haram militants spread like wild fire in far north Cameroon.
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