Barbaric Ritual of Breast Ironing: Flattening Girl’s Chests to Hide Her Youth

The ritual of flattening a girl's breast using ironing technique is growing at an alarming rate. This practice has emerged to protect girls from being raped or harassed as they grow older into women. According to the statistics, it has affected more than 3.8 Million women across the world who have undergone this barbaric ritual, says a UN Report. In this process, a large spoon, stones and a spatula are heated over coals which is then used to disfigure the breast tissue so that the girl looks less womanly, reports Daily Mail. This practice is highly common in Nigeria, Cameroon and South Africa where 58% times, it is the mother of the girl who forces her daughter to go through this ritual. The logic behind preventing 11-15-year-old girls from developing breasts is to discourage men from showering her with unwanted attention and to avoid any case of premarital pregnancy.

As told by writer Leyla Hussein to Cosmopolitan, this practice of destroying her breasts may take between days to weeks before her breast tissue is damaged. Sometimes, the breast ironing is a secret that is shared only between the mother and daughter while the father remains completely unaware of it. Even the girl does not question the mother thinking that whatever she is doing must be in her best interest.

Worldpulse reported that even though this practice is done behind closed doors, in the privacy of homes but it exists and it is gruesome. The pubescent girls are made to undergo bodily torture by their mothers by using objects like hammer, mortal and pestle, coconut shells etc. Mothers massage the growing breasts of their daughters until any indication of her natural swells are completely destroyed. The ritual emerges from the desperate of needs of the mother to protect their growing daughters from being victimized by men.