A/HRC/4/34 page 14 despite commendable legal and institutional measures in place for women’s advancement, it is hard not to perceive these violations as harmful social traditions rather than merely as the crimes of individual, deviant perpetrators. 34. Compartmentalizing violence against women and neatly partitioning it into “practices” may at times also be counterproductive, if commonalities and shared root causes of such practices are not identified and integrated into a holistic strategy. In some cases, merely suppressing a harmful practice may only shift the problem, unless the root causes are thoroughly addressed. The case of Cameroon is illustrative in this regard. Female genital mutilation, which is prevalent in the country, is said to be slowly declining as various actors have launched awareness-raising campaigns and some senior government officials have come out to denounce it as violence. At the same time, however, another harmful practice that seeks to control the sexuality of women through violence, referred to as “breast-ironing”, is reportedly on the rise in Cameroon and surrounding countries. Scorching-hot objects are placed on the budding breasts of a young girl in the hope of preventing the breasts from growing too soon so that the girl remains unattractive to men and does not engage in sexual intercourse at an early age.22 4. Normative challenges in the name of culture Global instruments 35. At the global level, despite many gains, the struggle for women’s human rights and gender equality has increasingly become an uphill battle. International instruments that foster the recognition of cultural diversity often do so without duly safeguarding the rights of women. On 20 October 2005, for instance, States adopted the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. The Convention formally recognizes that its provisions may not be invoked to infringe or limit human rights and fundamental freedoms as enshrined in the Universal Declaration or guaranteed by international law, but it fails to make explicit reference to the Convention, the Declaration, or the principle of gender equality in general. Moreover, article 20 seems to suggest that the UNESCO Convention is not subordinate to any other treaty. These drafting ambiguities might tempt States that have entered extensive reservations against the Convention or other human rights conventions on grounds of culture or never ratified such conventions for the same reason to invoke the UNESCO Convention in bad faith to politically justify their position. 36. It is often asserted that cultural rights held by individuals or groups, including minorities, indigenous people or immigrant communities, can be invoked to trump women’s human rights 22 The practice causes severe pain and can result in strong fevers, malformations of the breasts, cysts and abscesses. A survey undertaken in Cameroon indicated that 38 per cent of all girls who developed breasts before the age of 11 had been subjected to breast ironing. For girls with breast development before the age of 9 the risk stood as high as 50 per cent. F. Ndonko and G. Ngo’o, Étude sur le modelage des seins au Cameroun, Yaoundé, 2006.