Little Girls’ Breasts Mutilated to ‘Protect’ them from Boko Haram in Cameroon

Breast ironing, a barbaric and brutal tradition where girls’ breasts are ‘flattened’ with hot irons and stones to keep men at bay is reportedly now the order of the day in Cameroon as parents think it’s an effective way to hide their maturity and protect them from the snares of Boko Haram.

Read an excerpt of a report by Philip Obaji Jr. culled from The Daily Beast.

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 among parents who hope to keep their daughters out of the hands of Boko Haram’s brutal jihadists.

“The process of breast ironing requires the use of any metal, including wooden sticks, pestles, spatulas, spoons and rocks,” said Maryam, a Cameroonian hairdresser now based in Ikom, a home to thousands of Cameroonian migrants and a market place for traders from the Central Africa country. “The heat from these tools is expected to melt the fat on the breast, and stop it from projecting.”

Maryam who said she had practiced breast ironing on two of her daughters, added that other methods can also be used in the practice.

“Most people prefer to wrap very tight elastic bandages around the chest of their daughters overnight, but that system usually keeps the girls very uncomfortable,” she said. “For my daughters, I used hot coconut shells or heated stones to flatten their breasts.”…

One Cameroonian mother, who recently began breast ironing procedures on her daughter, told me in Ikom, where she came to buy goods, 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.

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“I live in Tiko in the southwest but my daughter schools in Maroua in the far north where terrible things happen, and I won’t take chances,” she said. “If they [Boko Haram] don’t see her breast, they won’t think she has come of age.”

Another Cameroonian lady who was in Ikom for trade 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.

“We didn’t want our daughters to be taken to the Sambisa forest,” the lady who gave her name as Agathe said. “It wasn’t just us. Many women did it on their daughters for the same reason.”

The United Nations Population Fund has named breast ironing as one of five under-reported crimes related to gender-based violence.