Girls Without Breasts
Many girls in Africa want to continue being what they are: girls. Although their capricious body development does not give them a chance to be. So comes the time to flee the punishment being a woman is. According to the UN, 3.8 million teenagers brutally crush their breasts with stones or sticks at high temperatures to stop their growth and avoid being raped.
Many girls in Africa want to continue being what they are: girls. Although their capricious body development does not give them a chance to be. So comes the time to flee the punishment being a woman is. According to the UN, 3.8 million teenagers brutally crush their breasts with stones or sticks at high temperatures to stop their growth and avoid being raped.
Western girls grow faster and faster. We used to play with dolls until age twelve or thirteen. Now at nine, they practice being older. They paint their nails, on occasions when their mothers allow it, they paint their lips with a soft gloss. Hair ironers. Television is less of reference point, Instagram as the precocious public closet of selfies. The candid world of emojis. To find the meaning of mixed feeling in one of them.
Rousseau defended that childhood has its own way of seeing, feeling and thinking. He said the most foolish thing to do was to try to replace them with our own. Luckily or unfortunately, we do not realize this until we mature. The Western world’s fortune does not count so much in millions as in opportunities. Here we have the option of choosing if we want to paint our nails or keep living a fairytale.
Many girls in Africa want to continue being what they are: girls. Although their capricious body development does not give them a chance to be. So comes the time to flee the punishment being a woman is. According to the UN, 3.8 million teenagers brutally crush their breasts with stones or sticks at high temperatures to stop their growth and avoid being raped. Doing so every day for months. Thousand of girls between ages 11 and 15 are forced to do so in Cameroon, Nigeria and South Africa. They run from the sexual attractiveness that unknowingly and unwillingly they awake. Fear devours them, or not them, but their mothers, who are in charge of the harsh practice. Rituals that take place everyday in the 21st century, which cause burns, infections, deformations and many psychological problems. It is another kind of female mutilation in countries, where according to the UN, 30% of girls are mothers before turning 18. It is the torment secretly lived by girls that will not be able to paint their nails or in a few years boast about their condition.
