Shocking! How Parent In West And Central Africa Iron Their Daughters Br£@st Just To Keep Them Away From Men
3 min read
Shocking! How Parent In West And Central Africa Iron Their Daughters Bre@st Just To Keep Them Away From Men.
For approximately 3.8 million girls around the world, the start of adolescence brings with it a practice called “br£@st ironing.” When these girls start showing signs of puberty, mothers begin “ironing” their br£@sts, using heated tools like stones, spatulas, and pestles to pound or massage their chests, in an attempt to prevent them from developing.
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Verbatim Photo
The practice is also known as “br£@st flattening” or “br£@st sweeping”. In order to prevent girls’ br£@sts from growing, mothers may also wrap bandages tightly around their daughters’ chests. “Br£@st ironing,” like “female genital mutilation” is a practice that has been perpetuated for the “good” of girls.
Prevalent in Cameroon and other African immigrant communities in the United Kingdom, br£@st ironing or flattening – also known as br£@st sweeping in South Africa – is taken lightly when it is clearly a harmful practice.
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The Guardian
It is practiced mainly in West and Central Africa – Benin, Chad, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, Kenya, Togo, and Zimbabwe – mothers or female relatives usually use hard or heated objects to flatten the br£@sts.
The heat melts the fat in the br£@sts and flattens them with time. The “good” motive behind this cruel practice was to protect girls from unwanted sexual advances, early pregnancies, and early marriages.
Safeguarding Hub
However, br£@st ironing has rather caused more harm than good, like Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) which has been outlawed in almost every country in Africa.
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The German development agency GIZ and the National Network of Aunties (RENATA), a Cameroon-based nongovernmental organization, where Cathy AbahFouda works, found out that 25 per cent of the 5,000 girls and women interviewed in a 2005 survey had been subjected to some form of br£@st ironing.
The Trent
The painful process often subjects girls to emotional trauma and tissue damage which can have long-term effects on them. Some women end up having one br£@st bigger than the other.
No effort has been made in Cameroon to curb the practice whose motive is ineffective as flattened br£@sts have not reduced the rate of teenage pregnancies and rape incidents.
This is Africa
What are your thoughts on this harmful practice?
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