After many years of harm, African girls still face cruel ‘breast ironing’ custom Prevalent in Cameroon and other African immigrant communities in the United Kingdom, breast ironing or flattening – also known as breast sweeping in South Africa – is taken lightly when it is clearly a harmful practice. This is the pounding and massaging of a girl’s breasts to stop them from developing. Practised mainly in West and Central Africa – Benin, Chad, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, Kenya, Togo and Zimbabwe – mothers or female relatives usually use hard or heated objects including stones, spatulas and pestles to flatten the breasts. The heat melts the fat in the breasts and flattens them with time. The “good” motive behind this cruel practice was to protect girls from unwanted sexual advances, early pregnancies and early marriages. However, breast ironing has rather caused more harm than good, like Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) which has been outlawed in almost every countr...