The BBC has a story

The BBC has a story today about a campaign against "breast ironing" in Cameroon. According to the story, 26 percent of pubescent girls there suffer beatings with pestles, coconuts and other blunt instruments to try to make the breasts "disappear." Mothers, the story says, breast iron their daughters to try to prevent them from having sex. Others do it voluntarily so they can go to school instead of getting married.

Student Geraldin Sirri recounted her painful experience.

"My mother took a pestle, she warmed it well in the fire and then she used it to pound my breasts while I was lying down. She took the back of a coconut, warmed it in the fire and used it to iron the breasts.

"I was crying and trembling to escape but there was no way."

Another woman from Mamfe in south-west Cameroon told me she ironed her own breasts as a girl so that she would not be forced into early marriage as is the practice in her village.

"I wanted to go to school like other girls who had no breasts," Emilia said.

I was blissfully unaware that it was even possible to beat away one's breasts. One source in the story says it "could cause damage." You don't say!

From the BBC story, he's an image of some tools used for breast ironing:

Feministing via Pharyngula