7-year-old Girl Gets Breast Implants-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
A report of a 7-year-old girl who got breast implants has stirred controversy.
The Truth:
False reports of a 7-year0ld girl who got breast implants can be traced back to a well-known fake news website.
The story appeared at World News Daily report under the headline, “7-year-old Girl Receives Breast Implants for Christmas,” in early February 2017. The report claims that a woman named Dana Mason took her 7-year-old daughter, Juliet, to China have the breast implant procedure done:
They left for China on December 22, and the surgery was performed two days later. According to the clinic, the operation took less than two hours and went exactly as planned.
The young girl now has a 30C cup, and her mother says she’s “extremely happy about her about her new breasts”.
The story was widely shared on social media and re-reported by other fake news outlets (in one version Juliet was supposedly 8-yeas-old when she got breast implants). Many people reacted to the story without checking its source, which its disclaimer clearly states is a fake news website that “assumes however all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content.”
The rouse about the 7-year-old girl wasn’t a new one, either. In 2014, well-known fake news website Empire News reported that a 10-year-old girl had traveled to Mexico to receive breast implants. That report was also fake.
In 1998, there was a factual report published by the U.K.’s Independent newspaper about a 12-year-old girl receiving breast implants. But the procedure was scheduled to correct a deformity in the girl’s chest that had caused her a lot of distress, her surgeon said:
“One breast has not developed. On one side she has an A cup and on the other a D cup. She has a problem that she is very upset about,” said Douglas McGeorge, who works for both the public and private sector. “She won’t go out. She won’t go into changing rooms at school. She won’t do sport. She won’t undress in front of friends.
Another U.K. family drew scrutiny in 2001 when they made plans for their 16-year-old daughter to get breast implants for a birthday present, the Guardian reports:
Jenna, of Warsop Vale, near Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, said she had been thinking about breast enlargement since she was 12. She insisted yesterday: “You’ve got to have breasts to be successful.
“Every other person you see on television has had implants. I used to pray that my boobs would grow. Then I just thought, what’s the point when I can have implants when I want?”
She will be 16 in August. “I just want to be happy with my body and I think having my breasts enlarged will give me more self-confidence.”
Her father Martin said he and his wife had been in the plastic surgery industry for a number of years, “so all our children have grown up with plastic surgery. They don’t see anything wrong with it and neither do we”.
So, over the last 20 years, stories about children getting breast implants have generated plenty of controversy and attention. That’s probably why clickbait and fake news websites have used false reports like the one about a 7-year-old girl getting breast implants to generate traffic.