The Mauritanian culture practices the tradition of force-feeding to prepare young girls for marriage. This puts these children at serious health risks, and it is a controversial issue in its own culture.
In the Mauritanian culture, women prepare young girls for marriage by sending them to a beautifying camp. At this beautifying camp, the girls undergo a process to become what is thought of as an ideal “beautiful woman.” Force-feeding in the Mauritanian culture emphasizes on the idea that beauty is perceived differently around the world.
According to the United Nation Regional Centre for Western Europe and other reliable sources, men in the West African country of Mauritania consider obese women beautiful, seeing their size as a sign of wealth and prestige.
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Beauty: stretch marks
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Wealth: fertility, prosperity.
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Prestige: mothers get praised for sending their girls to this beautifying camp.
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Healthy children: It is perceived in the Mauritanian culture that the bigger the mother is, then the healthier her children will be.
“My stomach hurts,” groans Tijanniya, the daughter of livestock dealers. “I don’t want to be fat. I don’t think it’s beautiful. Now I see why some girls at school came back fat after vacation, but they were much prettier before,” Marie Claire Magazine.
The Miss Universe Venezuela competition can be used as a great comparison to the “beautifying” of the women in the Mauritanian culture.
At the Miss Universe Venezuela Academy, girls get sent off to be “beautified” to win a pageant title. Similarly, Mauritanian girls get sent off to “beautifying “camps to be “beautified” to woo men and prepare for a wedding.
The women in Venezuelan Academy undergo a series of butt lifts, nose jobs, and plastic surgery to become the ideal beautiful woman for the pageant. And, at the Mauritanian beautifying camp, the girls consume 14,000-16,000 calories per day until they meet the ideal image of “beauty”. Their diet includes milk, peanuts and high-calorie food in general. Force-feeding exposes the young girls of the Mauritanian culture to many health risks.
In the picture: Young girls at the “fattening farm” in Mauritania getting their daily dose of calories.
Consuming an outrageous amount of calories per day is very unhealthy and it has led to developing a number of diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease.
Matrons, women in charge of the fattening farm, roll sticks on the girls’ thighs to break down muscle tissue and speed up the weight gain process. Most of the girls get married between the ages of 12 and 14. “Increasing a girl’s size creates the illusion that she’s physically mature, that she’s ready for a husband,” notes Aminetou Moctar, a feisty, pencil-thin woman in her 50s who is chief of the Association of Women Heads of Households, an equal-rights organization in Nouakchott. “But force-feeding grows the body and shrinks the brain all the girls do is eat and sleep.”
In the picture: Matrons- women in charge of the “fattening farms.”
A survey was done by the UNRIC on the physical effects force-feeding has on the young girls and at least 15% of the girls reported that their skin split as a result of overeating.
Today there are Mauritanians who are fighting to stop this practice as well as enforce this practice. According to reports, the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (CEDAW or the convention) is fighting to stop this practice but it is extremely hard, as it has been tradition and it is normal in the Mauritanian culture.