by EVA FERNANDEZ OTIZ
Cameroon girls face multiple dangers as their bodies mature, including the dangers of early pregnancy where traditions have lead mothers to use any means necessary, including breast ironing, in efforts to protect them. Huffington Post
All mothers will do whatever it takes to protect their children’s well being. In Cameroon, this ‘protection’ goes as far as burning their teenage daughters’ breasts. Breast ironing is a traditional practice that painfully affects about one in four girls in Cameroon, Africa. But new education programs for girls by Cameroon volunteer ‘Aunties’ are showing progress.
“I was 11 years old. My mum did it to me. She put the pestle next to the fireside and massaged the breast. It was very painful…,” remembers Cameroonian Lindsay Efuengho, who is twenty-two-years-old.
Surveys in Cameroon indicate that 38 percent of all girls who develop breasts before the age of 11 have been subjected to breast ironing. For girls who begin to have breast development before the age of 9 the risk is as high as 50 per cent.
The case of twenty-six-year-old Joyce Forghab was even worse. She was only 8 years old when the painful forced procedure began.
“My mum did not even use her hands; she used cardboard or something to protect her hands because she knew that it was very painful, it was really hot. So she took the stone and pressed it to my breasts and massaged them.”
Often girls are held down during the procedure which can result in severe bruises, burned skin, abscessed regions in the chest and breast abnormalities. “The practice causes severe pain and can result in strong fevers, malformations of the breasts, cysts and abscesses,” said independent medical researchers F. Ndonko and G. Ngo’o in 2007.
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