In Venezuela, girls as young as 12 to get cosmetic surgeries like butt lifts and nose jobs under their parents' supervision in order to look more like beauty queens.

The obsession with winning pageant competitions runs deep in Venezuela, where there are many women who have been crowned Miss World and Miss Universe. It has trickled down to young teens and girls, who will go to shocking lengths to meet the beauty ideals of title holders, reports the Daily Mail.

Besides exterior cosmetic surgeries, girls will undergo internal procedures as well to lose or keep off weight, including cutting out part of their intestines to limit the amount of food absorbed by the body or sewing plastic mesh onto the surface of the tongue to make eating solid food unbearable. Girls will also have plaster casts molded of their bodies to help shrink their waists.

While these seem like extreme steps for young girls to take to obtain the ideal beauty queen body, many of their parents seem to be encouraging these practices. Parents will often inject their daughters–some as young as 8 or 9 years old–with hormones that delay the onset of puberty. This allows the girls to grow taller.

Much of this trend is also encouraged by many of the country's "beauty academies," which are essentially finishing schools for hopeful beauty queens. These schools are attended by thousands of Venezuelan girls as young as 4, according to the Daily Mail.

Much of this push to see their daughters succeed out of poverty comes, with disappointment for so many who don't win the crown, and sometimes, the consequences are even worse. Besides their families putting up extensive amounts of money for surgeries and the beauty academies, there can also be physical tolls on the girls.

Dozens of teenage girls die each year during cosmetic surgery in Venezuela. Public service campaigns recently took aim at educating girls about the potential harms that come from liquid silicone butt injections before the age of 12. It's a stark difference from other messages that encourage girls to "get them early." Many parents end up offering these injections for quinceañeras, which is an important milestone for the Latinas.

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