A Painful Practice for Cameroon’s Girls..

DOUALA, Cameroon — A small pack of elementary-school-age kids surrounded me every time I left my favorite lunch spot, holding up old wine bottles filled with fried groundnuts. “Madame, please, I need to eat,” they shouted.

I never bought the nuts. I ran the eight-foot gantlet from the restaurant to my Toyota SUV with my 2-year-old daughter, Elle, on my hip. Sometimes I gave the kids taffy or leftover shawarma but usually, like many expatriate wives in this poor West African nation, I tried to avoid the swirl of desperate children.

One afternoon, however, I saw something impossible to ignore. Unaware that one side of her tank top had slid off her tiny shoulder, a young girl in the crowd clutched a bottle of nuts under one arm and waved to me with the other, revealing a long, wide scar where a small nipple or budding breast should have been.

My eyes darted from the girl’s missing breast to her big brown eyes and back to her chest. She disappeared in the distance as I drove away. The encounter revealed that a Cameroonian tradition I had heard vague whispers about might actually exist: breast ironing, in which women flatten adolescent girls’ developing breasts, intending to protect the girls from the dangers of sex, consensual or otherwise.

The phenomenon gained some international attention in 2006, thanks to a campaign by a nonprofit organization, and the State Department has since included breast ironing in its annual reports on human rights abroad. But the practice persists nevertheless, affecting as many as one in four girls, according to local health activists. Some mothers massage hot grinding stones into their daughters’ chests; others pound the tissue with heated plantain peels. Sometimes, women rub kerosene or medicinal herbs on adolescent breasts.

To understand what would drive a mother to press a hot stone into her daughter’s chest, I talked to local women, girls, physicians and community organizers. Many of the women and girls involved in breast ironing considered it normal treatment for early breast development. Mothers told me they forcibly try to eliminate signs of puberty to protect their preteen girls from HIV and pregnancy. One mother explained that she did it out of love.