I am passionate about topics relating to women and human rights; I believe this was displayed by my decision of focusing my MA dissertation on the subject of women’s rights and gender inequalities in a developing country. This led me to a two weeks trip to Cameroon to conduct the research and interviews relevant my project “Why breast ironing? Reasons behind this Cameroonian female mutilation.”
This dissertation deals which the social and cultural reasons behind the practice of breast ironing in Cameroon. This is a tradition in which the growing breasts of young Cameroonian girls are ironed by hot stones or pestles in order to suppress, or reduce their growth and size. This custom is mostly performed by the mothers or aunts of the girls in question.
The justification given for this mutilation is that it is a way of preventing them from being sexually developed at an early age and potentially suffer from the negative consequence related to sex, such as AIDS, unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions or school removals. Therefore, breast ironing is performed in Cameroon with the hope that it will protect girls from the aforementioned harms and offer them a brighter future in life.
This project gathers fresh information from two different perspectives. Firstly, it deals with the use and practice of breast ironing itself, taking into account its rationale according to those who perform it in an environment where it‟s practise is commonplace. In this sense, the research contains in-depth and current data about breast ironing, which has never been widely reported by the international media, only by some nongovernmental organisations which started to take an interest in this issue roughly ten years ago.
Secondly, this study approaches breast ironing from a social perspective of which there has been very little work done previously. While many authors have described breast ironing and it‟s links to the avoidance of AIDS and early pregnancies, the social and feminist side of the subject has never been analysed in depth.
This research hoped to reveal that there is a strong correlation between the practice of breast ironing and both educational and socio-cultural issues within Cameroonian societies.
