Beauty canons vary around the world, but most women invariably try to match them. In traditional societies, where a girl's well-being is often dependent on male attention, appearance is especially important. What sacrifices the girls are forced to make by their mothers, believing that this will bring only good to their daughters - in the material of "Lenta.ru".
Silent crime
In Cameroon, many women understand how important a good education is for their daughters. Mothers are ready to go to extremes so that their girls do not get married in adolescence, as they once did to themselves. Even outright cruelty. According to the UN, 24 percent of girls in the country have undergone breast burning with hot stones or iron. 58 percent of girls who survived the procedure were injured at the hands of their own mothers.
Girls between the ages of eight and 16 are usually subjected to this torture in the hope of saving them from male intrusive attention, rape and early pregnancy. The fact is that in the country it is believed that if a girl has a breast, she is already ready for marriage and the birth of children. As a result of the procedure and lack of proper scars treatment, girls may develop cysts and, over time, breast cancer may develop. With the birth of a baby, other problems are revealed, for example, the lack of breast milk. What's more, research shows that moxibustion does nothing to combat violence. Many Cameroonian men were unaware of the practice until journalism began to appear about it.
A similar tradition is also common in Chad, Togo, Benin, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. Since the 2010s, along with immigrants from central and western Africa, the custom has spread to the UK. Girls often believe that this is for their good and do not want to lose their mother, so they do not admit what happened to others. They carefully hide their scars, and in schools refuse to undergo medical examinations and change clothes for sports. After the procedure, girls often withdraw into themselves, but do not name the reason because of shame.
Psychotherapist Leila Hussein, who works at a clinic in north London, claims five of her clients had chest burns. They all had British citizenship. “One of them told me 'I have a flat chest like a boy's', and there are scars! But no one has ever examined them or asked about it. And this is in the capital! - the woman is indignant.
Jennifer Mirage, who has worked as a nurse in hospitals in Glasgow, Brumfield, Birmingham and London for over a decade, noted that the number of women with disfigured breasts has increased over the years. She personally met 15 adult women and eight girls with burn scars on their chest. “I somehow took care of a ten-year-old girl who had an infection. The disease appeared after several years of breast burning,”she admitted.
One of the women described the painful procedure to reporters: “I took a stone, heated it and started massaging my daughter's breasts. The stone was hot. When I started the massage, she said: “Mommy, I'm hot!””The unfortunate mother was interrogated, she was warned and released from the police station. Although material on the practice appears regularly in the British press, no arrests have been made so far. It is not even necessary to speak about Cameroon in such a way.
Member of the House of Lords Alex Carlile (Alex Carlile) urged the police to actively fight against the spread of moxibustion. “It’s time for the police and the prosecutor’s office to pay attention to the problem and begin to tackle it decisively, given the impact it has on the young victims and their environment.” He was actively supported by the Committee on Children and Gender Equality.
However, Nuyudjevira, who lives in the UK, who was once disfigured by her mother in this way, only shakes her head.“The British are so polite when it comes to what they consider to be cultural. But if because of these "features" children, little girls who are secretly mutilated, suffer, then this should not be considered normal."
Reverse diet
While in the Western world women under the influence of gloss continue to diet in the hope of losing weight, in Mauritania and Nigeria obese ladies are considered the standard of beauty. Stretch marks are called especially handsome men. To increase the chances of their daughters for a happy marriage, mothers give them to so-called wet nurses from the age of five. They must force even the thinnest girl to get better, so that she ceases to be a "shame for the family." The practice of force-feeding is called leblukh.
Nurses feed girls huge plates of fatty couscous, breadcrumbs in olive oil, figs and lamb, make them drink about twenty liters of camel milk and eat fat from camel humps a day. If the girl cannot finish the dish, she is punished. The child's feet are placed between wooden sticks and placed on top of the weight. Nurse vomiting is considered "a normal and natural reaction of a growing organism." Nurses do not allow the wards to move, so that they do not inadvertently lose weight. At eight years old, girls weigh about 140 kilograms, adult women of marriageable age - 200.
“Girls are sent to the wet-nurses for school holidays or during the rainy season, when the cattle give a lot of milk, and nothing is explained to them. They suffer, but they are told from everywhere that only fat women will be happy,”explains human rights activist Fatimata Mbaye. According to WHO, 20 percent of Mauritanian women are obese. Overweight men are only four percent of the total population. As girls grow up, they suffer from numerous diseases: obesity, hypertension and heart disease.
The younger generation believes that tradition should be left in the past. “We must end the tradition that threatens our lives. I know so many innocent girls who were forced to grow fat against their will in order to get married, and most of them suffer from diseases,”said 25-year-old Mariam Mint Ahmed. “My mother started fattening me up when I was 13. She beat me to make me eat more. Each time it seemed to me that my stomach was about to explode,”recalls Selekha Mint Sidi. The woman stated that she was not going to fatten her daughter, no matter what happened.
“I think it is necessary to fatten up girls. Thin daughters are a disgrace to family and tribe. And men are unlikely to look at them,”says 55-year-old Achetu Mint Taleb. The woman considers herself an excellent mother: she gave her two daughters to wet nurses for two years at the age of eight. “They were incredibly plump, quickly married and gave birth before the age of 17. The daughters run the house and come to my house on weekends. I am very proud of what I did for them. In Mauritania, the size of a woman shows how much space she occupies in a man's heart,”she admits.
Mar Hubero Capdeferro, UN Representative for Gender and Population in Mauritania, explains that beauty standards have developed historically: “Usually, if a woman is fat, her family has money to feed her. They are not poor people, they have money for food for little girls. So fat women have become the standard of beauty: the more magnificent you are, the prettier you are considered. But the situation, she said, is beginning to change. Many young women no longer want to feed their daughters. If women used to stay at home, now they go to work, walk, play sports. Many people follow their health, looking at the older generation: Mauritanians at 40 and 50 years old have difficulty walking, suffer from diabetes and heart disease.
However, those who continue to fatten their daughters are resorting to increasingly extreme methods. Some girls are given chemicals instead of camel milk, which are used to make cattle grow fatter. Women who grew up on hormonal preparations for animals have a disproportionate body: huge breasts, stomach and cheeks, but thin arms and legs. These women are more likely than those fed on natural food to suffer from heart and hormonal diseases and infertility. Some go crazy.
Dr. Wadel Lemin from the Metropolitan Hospital noted that several girls suffering from eating disorders are admitted to the hospital every day. Many of them go to doctors not for the first time - their parents refuse to follow the doctors' recommendations and continue to feed them.
Reluctant tattoos
As a rule, parents are cool with the intention of their teenage daughters to get a tattoo. Indian woman Geeta Pandey from Uttar Pradesh, on the other hand, was trained from childhood to have several tattoos, as well as pierced nose and ears, like her mother and grandmother.
The fact is that in the community where she comes from, all married women should do tattoos called Godna. “The family explained to me that if I didn’t have a tattoo, then no one in my spouse’s family would take food and water from my hands. I will be considered unclean, untouchable,”explained Pandey.
Her mother was getting married in the 1940s when she was about to turn 11. A few weeks after the wedding, an old woman came to her and gave her a tattoo. Of the tools, the old woman had only a needle, which she heated in a fire, and black dye. The child was not given an anesthetic, and the old woman did not have any ointments either. “I cried all the time and pinched the old woman. In the end, she complained to my grandfather and called me a problem,”Pandey's mother recalled in conversations with her daughter. The scar healed for about a month. The drawing depicted leaves and flowers.
According to anthropologist Kei Pandey, usually women get tattoos with floral designs, the name of the father or husband, the name of the village, a totem, a symbol of the family, or the image of one of the gods. Over the years of research, she has seen millions of village women tattooed throughout India. Only sometimes men also got tattoos. “This is a symbol of identification, both in our world and in the afterlife. It is believed that after death a person will be asked where he is from, and he will be able to show the tattoo and answer this question."
The Baiga people of Madhya Pradesh have been tattooing girls for over two thousand years. “As soon as girls became teenagers, they got their first tattoo on their foreheads. Then, over the course of several years, most of their bodies were covered with drawings,”said Pragya Gupta, who had been visiting their villages for several years as part of a program to provide the country with clean drinking water. According to her, all women of the people have tattoos, but more and more young girls refuse to apply them. Baiga beat tattoos for girls exclusively in the forest, away from men's eyes. This is explained by a sign: if a man sees a woman covered in blood in the morning, his day will not work out. The pattern is scratched with a bamboo stem, and then beaten with needles with dye from the seeds of the Abyssinian hvizotia.
Gupta associates this with the establishment of communications: the construction of new roads, the emergence of television and mobile phones. The children of the Baiga people began to go to school and found that not all women have tattoos. “I met 15-year-old Anita. She had a tattoo on her forehead and said that she was in so much pain that she would never allow this to happen to herself again. And her mother, 40-year-old Badri, has tattoos covering almost the entire body,”the woman said.
Badri supported her daughter's decision. “I was illiterate and obeyed my parents in everything. And Anita goes to school, and if she doesn't want a tattoo, then I agree with that,”the Indian woman explained. True, for the sake of such indulgence, Anita had to promise that she would periodically stay at home: cook, clean and look after her younger brothers and sisters while her mother works on the farm. The girl's attendance has dropped and she may have to stay for a second year.
