Ugliness for the sake of happiness: how mothers in Africa and India mutilate their daughters to arrange their lives

The concepts of female beauty in different countries differ significantly. The canons of attractiveness have been formed for centuries and they are influenced by a variety of factors: religion, social conditions and even climate. But it's one thing when a woman herself determines how she would like to look, and quite another when she is forcibly "modified" in childhood. Unfortunately, this is what is practiced in many countries of Africa and Asia. (Careful! The article contains shocking materials).

In a society where patriarchy reigns and the well-being of women depends on men, appearance plays a dominant role. To ensure the happiness of their daughters, mothers do terrible things from our point of view. Sometimes it bears fruit, sometimes not, but in most cases the child receives serious physical and psychological injuries.

In Cameroon, a village girl has few options to successfully build her life. This is either a successful marriage or getting an education and moving to a city or another country. But in this country, a woman does not always belong to herself. In Cameroon, girls are married in adolescence, and at the same time, often, the decisive word in choosing the time of the wedding and the groom remains not for the bride or her mother, but for the father or elders.

After getting married, the girl no longer belongs to herself and, in fact, her life is reduced to the birth and upbringing of children, as well as housework. Mothers, wishing their daughters well, resort to a barbaric procedure — they rub the baby's chest with hot stones or iron so that it loses its shape and stops growing. A girl treated in this way loses a significant share of attractiveness for men and it is easier for her to manage her own destiny.

According to information published by the UN, up to 24% of women in Cameroon have undergone this terrible procedure. At the same time, 58% of them suffered at the hands of their own mothers. Painful surgery is performed on girls aged 8 to 16 years and its main purpose is to save the child from early pregnancy, marriage of convenience or rape. In the country, it is traditionally believed that with the appearance of a breast, a girl, regardless of age, is considered ready for sexual life, marriage and the birth of children. Read also — The shocking tradition of Cameroon — breast ironing.

Moxibustion or "ironing" of the breast is not only a painful procedure that disfigures the body. The lack of basic medical care sometimes leads to death and always to severe psychological trauma. The effects of moxibustion can manifest throughout life. These include the absence of breast milk after the birth of a child, the appearance of cancer and much more. In addition, a woman, having a cosmetic defect, is shy of her body and even disgusted with it.

Does such a tradition help to achieve the desired result? It is believed that yes. But research conducted by humanitarian missions suggests the opposite. According to surveys of Cameroonian men, many of them do not know about the practice of moxibustion and learn about it directly at the time of the survey or from recent publications in the press.

Cameroon is not the only country where children have their breasts "ironed". This practice, although somewhat less common, is found in Chad, Togo, Benin, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. The most terrible thing is that together with emigrants from African countries, this savagery migrated to Europe. Since 2010, during medical examinations or by accident, the facts of moxibustion have regularly surfaced in the UK.

Among emigrants, it is not customary to take out litter from the hut and the girls carefully hide their injuries. They refuse medical procedures under various pretexts and do not want to change clothes at school, in the presence of classmates and teachers. Nurse Jennifer Mirage from Glasgow reported that every year she is increasingly faced with the results of moxibustion during medical examinations.

For 10 years of working in different clinics in the country, she has encountered 15 adult women and 8 girls with traces of breast ironing.

Jennifer is sure that medical help in such cases is sought only in extreme cases, as they are embarrassed by the scars and the very fact of the existence of a wild custom. Periodically, the police learn about cauterization and react to the signal, but, almost always, the case is limited to questioning and issuing a warning to the child's mother. In Cameroon, the authorities do not pay attention to the very fact of the existence of such a tradition at all.

Alex Carlile, a member of the House of Lords, is considered one of the most implacable fighters against the terrible custom. He regularly appeals to the police not to overlook the facts of cauterization and to bring all those involved to strict responsibility.

The policy is actively supported by public organizations and the State Committee on Children and Gender Equality. But the women themselves, who suffered in childhood at the hands of their own mothers, do not believe that anything will change in the near future. When asked for their opinion, they say that the British are too sensitive about so-called "cultural peculiarities" to take any effective measures.

Another problem of African countries can be called the forced fattening of children. While women all over the world are storming fitness clubs and exhausting themselves with diets, the cult of excess weight reigns in Mauritania and Nigeria. An elegant girl in these countries has minimal chances of successfully getting married, so brides are prepared for marriage from childhood.

At the age of five, the child is given to the so-called "wet nurses", who are paid for forcing the girl to eat a lot and gain weight by any available means. This custom in Mauritania is called lebluh and it is widespread in almost all segments of the population. In order for the girl to stop "shaming her parents," she is forcibly forced to eat huge portions of high-calorie food.

The menu usually includes fatty couscous, lamb and figs. Also, the child is forced to drink huge doses of camel milk and eat fat from camel humps. Girls who do not overpower the portions intended for them, or categorically refuse to eat, are severely punished by pinching their feet between the poles. In addition, nurses consider vomiting from overeating to be a completely normal reaction to "proper" nutrition.

In order to achieve the goal set by the child's parents faster, the nurses forbid the wards to move so that they do not accidentally lose weight. Such fattening leads to severe forms of obesity in children. Often , by the age of 8 , a girl is fed up to 120-140 kg . Often a girl "on the way out" has a weight of 180-200 kg and stretch marks all over her body, which are considered especially beautiful by locals.

Human rights activist Fatimata Mbae told the press that it is customary to send girls to wet nurses on holidays or during the rainy season, when cattle give especially a lot of milk. Of course, nothing is explained to the child, limited only to instructions that "only a fat woman can be beautiful, healthy and happy." According to WHO, in Mauritania, only 4% of men are overweight, but more than 20% of women are obese.

Needless to say that a "beautiful and happy" girl weighing about two hundredweight, even before the age of 30, acquires a whole list of serious health problems, including hypertension, coronary heart disease, problems with the stomach, liver, endocrine system and joints.

Representing the UN in Mauritania's Mar Hubero Capdeferro explains that the peculiar standards of beauty in this African country did not appear suddenly, but developed over centuries.

Despite this, Capdeferro notes with satisfaction that lebluh is gradually losing supporters. Statistics show that mothers are much less likely to give their daughters to wet nurses. The attitude of women towards themselves is beginning to change — if earlier they traditionally stayed at home with their children, today they want to study, travel and play sports.

Many girls have a good example in front of them — their mothers. In Mauritania, it is quite common for a 40-50-year-old woman to barely move under the yoke of her weight and the diseases that it caused. Having access to modern means of transmitting information, as well as communicating with representatives of public organizations, young women learn how their peers live in other countries and try to look up to them, and not to the older generation.

But progress in the fight against dark customs does not always have only a positive side. For those who remain supporters of fattening, modern pharmacology opens up the widest opportunities for experiments on their own children. Some people replace camel milk with hormonal and chemical preparations produced for animals. Girls who are "brought to condition" by veterinary means can be seen immediately. They have a disproportionately large body, a large belly and a massive chest, with thin limbs.

This practice is even more detrimental to girls than the usual fattening. Infertility, heart disease and mental disorders are common for them. Girls who have been poisoned with drugs for livestock regularly end up in hospitals across the country and, worst of all, repeatedly. This suggests that the health and life of the child does not mean as much to relatives as public opinion, and fattening continues even after illness.

Few parents in our country will be happy about the desire of a minor daughter to get a tattoo. For girls of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, tattooing, as well as nose piercing, is a completely normal phenomenon. Geeta Pandey, who has undergone a number of procedures to change her appearance, talks about the tradition like this:

Tattoos, which are called good here, are done to all girls who have married. Since marriages in this state are concluded very early, ornaments on the face and hands are usually applied at 13-14 years old. Gita said that it was even worse before. The woman's mother got married at the age of 11 and a couple of weeks after the wedding, an elderly woman came to the house and made her traditional tattoos of patterns and leaves on her forehead, cheeks and hands.

A steel needle was used as a tool, which was disinfected in the fire, and the black paint was of unknown origin. The old woman did not use any anesthesia during the work, so Gita's mother recalled that she pulled out and pinched the tattoo artist.

Indian anthropologist Kei Pandi said that tattoos in the form of lines or plants are most often applied. But sometimes the name of the husband, the native village or the drawing of the deity is impaled. There are also tattooed men, but there are much fewer of them. The rite is associated with pagan ideas about the afterlife. After death, the spirits will be able to find out the status of a person and what area he is from.

In the state of Madhya Pradesh, the Baiga people live, having a tradition of tattooing girls. The custom, which is already two thousand years old, requires the application of the first ornaments on the forehead of girls who become teenagers. After that, they are covered with tattoos almost completely for several years, observing a certain sequence and term. Researchers say that 10 years ago, without exception, all baiga women were tattooed, and only in recent years, some girls began to resist this rite of initiation.

The tattoo technology used by baiga is even more barbaric than the one used in Uttar Pradesh. The outline of the drawing is not pricked with a needle, but scratched out with a sharpened bamboo stalk, then rubbing vegetable dye into the wounds. Small details and solid filling are made with bundles of needles. The ceremony takes place in far from sanitary conditions — in the forest thicket. This is due to the fact that the men of the tribe cannot be present at the tattooing and even see the women bloody after the work of the master.

The popularity of tattoos is falling due to the development of communications. Once living in isolation, the Baiga got the opportunity to teach their children in schools, as well as receive information through television and the Internet. Girls of this tribe, arriving for the first time at a school located far from their native places, are surprised to see their peers and adult women living without drawings on their face and body. Often after that, they refuse to draw drawings or prevent the continuation of work on ornaments.