BREAST IRONING SHOULD BE ABOLISHED FROM OUR CUSTOM AND TRADITION

The practice involves ironing a girl's chest with hot objects to delay breasts from growing, so she does not attract male attention should be stop.

A girl call 'kinaya' whose family descends from west Africa - where breast ironing originates - and she was subjected to it aged 10.

She said her mother told her that "if I don't iron them, men will start coming to you, to have sex with you".

It is often the child's mother who will undertake the breast ironing, which usually involves heating a stone or spoon on a flame then pressing, massaging or flattening the breast.

This can go on for months.

"Time does not erase that kind of pain," Kinaya explained.

"You're not even allowed to cry out. If you do, you [are said to] have brought shame to your family, you are not a 'strong girl'."

Kinaya is now an adult with daughters of her own.

When her eldest turned 10, her mother proposed that she be breast ironed.

"I said, 'No, no, no, none of my children are going to go through what I went through, as I still live with the trauma."

She has since moved away from her family, believing there was a real risk they would have performed breast ironing on her daughters without her consent.

It is thought that around 1,000 girls in the UK have been affected by breast ironing.

But while awareness is growing around female genital mutilation (FGM), there are fears that few people know about breast ironing.

One woman told the Victoria Derbyshire programme she only realised breast ironing was not normal when she discovered her body looked different to her classmates during a PE class at her UK school, which led her to become distressed.

Her sister had breast ironed her from age eight, but her teachers failed to notice when she became withdrawn and stopped wanting to take part in PE lessons.

"If my PE teacher had known, if they were trained, I could have had the help I needed growing up," she said.

Source : CNN