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| MEN & MATTERS | | Heard of 'breast ironing' ? | | B L KAK
Pleasing to human eye is a female's budding breasts. Heated stones have nothing to do with girls' bosoms. Yet, these two things you can come across in a country called Cameroon. Situated between West and Central Africa, Cameroon, originally part of the German colony in West Africa, became a republic in 1960.
In 1984, the country was renamed the Republic of Cameroon. It is a free country. Sadly, young girls in Cameroon have tough times to face. A media report put out from Yaounde, capital of Cameroon, just the other day is awe-inspiring. It makes a pointed reference to 'ironing' of budding breasts of females.
Bone-chilling instance cited by the report: Worried that her daughters' budding breasts would expose them to the risk of sexual harassment and even rape, their mother, Philomene Moungang, started 'ironing' their bosoms with a heated stone. The media report quoted Moungang as saying:"I did it to my two girls when they were eight years old. I would take the grinding stone, heat it in the fire and press it hard on the breasts. They cried and said it was painful. But I explained that it was for their own good."
In West Africa, breast ironing the use of hard or heated objects or other substances to try to stunt breast growth in girls is a traditional practice. Now a new survey has revealed that it is shockingly widespread in Cameroon, where one in four teenagers are subjected to the traumatic process by relatives, often hoping to lessen their sexual attractiveness. The survey was sponsored German Development agency GTZ. Its representative, Flavien Ndonko, who is also an anthropologist, has gone on record as saying: "Breast ironing is an age-old practice in Cameroon, as well as in many other countries in West and Central Africa, including Chad, Togo, Benin, Guinea-Conakry, just to name a few".
A top official of government of India gave me a copy of the report he had received from Yaounde. He told me that as the practice of 'breast ironing' is traditional across Cameroon, little can be done in the absence of any resistance from the populace of Cameroon against it. The official, who is conversant with the ebb and flow of Cameroon's altered or altering situation, seemed to be in line with Flavien Ndonko's reported statement: "If society has been silent about it up to now it is because, like other harmful practices done to women such as female genital mutilation, it was thought to be good for the girl. Even the victims themselves thought it was good for them".
Be that as it may, the practice has many side-affects, including severe pain and abscesses, infections, breast cancer, and even the complete disappearance of one or both breasts. The survey of more than 5,000 girls and women aged between 10 and 82 from throughout Cameroon, published in June this year, estimated that 4 million women in the central African country have suffered the process.
The report also quoted Moungang, mother of two daughters, as saying: "When I was growing up as a little girl my mother did it to me just as all other women in the village did it to their girl children. So I thought it was just good for me to do to my own children".
Here is another human interest story: People who have been drinking may miss objects that appear unexpectedly in their field of sight, even when their blood alcohol levels are just half the legal driving limit. "In light of this result, perhaps lawmakers should reconsider the level of intoxication deemed legal to operate a vehicle," Dr. Seema L. Clifasefi of the University of Washington suggests in a report.
This phenomenon, known as inattentional blindness, occurs commonly among people who are sober, Clifasefi and her team note. Alcohol is known to impair fine motor skills, reaction time and visual attention, they point out, but to date no one has studied what effect it may have on inattentional blindness.
To investigate, the researchers had 47 volunteers watch a video of two teams passing basketballs back and forth and asked them to count how many times the team wearing white T-shirts passed the ball. During the video, a woman dressed in a gorilla suit appeared among the players, stood in the middle of the screen and beat her chest, and then walked away.
The subjects were given a beverage and asked to drink it over a 10-minute period five minutes before watching the video. After viewing it, the researchers interviewed them to determine if they'd seen the gorilla. Half of the study participants were given a placebo drink, while the other half consumed a vodka and tonic formulated to bring their blood alcohol level up to half the legal driving limit for most US states, or 0.04.
Half of people within each of those groups were then told they were given alcohol, while the other half were told their beverages didn't contain alcohol. People who were told they had received alcohol reported feeling more intoxicated and had no effect on their likelihood of seeing the gorilla-costumed woman. Overall, one third of the study participants didn't notice the gorilla. Among those who were sober, 46 per cent spotted the gorilla, compared to 18 per cent of the intoxicated group.
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