Well, you could knock me over with a Strasbourg goose feather right about now. Am I the only one who hasn't heard about this before? I will say this. Leave it to the Muslims to come up with this particular ritual form of female abuse... Fattening farms where women get the Kobe beef treatment in preparation for marriage. And they do this to girls as young as 5.
It's called 'leblouh' and involves binging and purging - sort of. If you eat so much you puke, you have to eat your vomit. OMG.
From the Guardian. (tip of Uncle Purdy's funeral hat to TROP.)
Fears are growing for the fate of thousands of young girls in rural Mauritania,
where campaigners say the cruel practice of force-feeding young girls
for marriage is making a significant comeback since a military junta
took over the West African country.
Aminetou Mint Ely, a women's
rights campaigner, said girls as young as five were still being
subjected to the tradition of leblouh every year. The practice sees
them tortured into swallowing gargantuan amounts of food and liquid -
and consuming their vomit if they reject it.
"In Mauritania, a
woman's size indicates the amount of space she occupies in her
husband's heart," said Mint Ely, head of the Association of Women Heads
of Households. ''We have gone backwards. We had a Ministry of Women's
Affairs. We had achieved a parliamentary quota of 20% of seats. We had
female diplomats and governors. The military have set us back by
decades, sending us back to our traditional roles. We no longer even
have a ministry to talk to." Mauritania has suffered a series of coups
since independence from France in 1960. The latest, in August last
year, saw General Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz seize power after the elected
president tried to sack him.
A children's rights lawyer, Fatimata
M'baye, echoed Ely's pessimism. "I have never managed to bring a case
in defence of a force-fed child. The politicians are scared of
questioning their own traditions. Rural marriages usually take place
under customary law or are overseen by a marabou (a Muslim preacher).
No state official gets involved, so there is no arbiter to check on the
age of the bride." Yet, she said, Mauritania had signed both
international and African treaties protecting the rights of the child.
Leblouh
is intimately linked to early marriage and often involves a girl of
five, seven or nine being obliged to eat excessively to achieve female
roundness and corpulence, so that she can be married off as young as
possible. Girls from rural families are taken for leblouh at special
"fattening farms" where older women, or the children's aunts or
grandmothers, will administer pounded millet, camel's milk and water in
quantities that make them ill. A typical daily diet for a six-year-old
will include:
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