Juliet's Branding

When Juliet's death sentence was commuted in "Stranger in a Strange Land", Ben orders the Others to mark Juliet instead. This is then revealed to be a strange symbol branded onto her lower back. The symbol looks like an upside-down cross (with the top line longer than the others), with two (or four) lines facing away from the center on the horizontal line. The mark is raised, reddened, and inflamed.
What exactly is the significance of this branding? Well, scarification can be used for various reasons , such as :

• to mark slaves and criminals
• to make the body complete
  
• as a rite of passage in adolescence
  
• denote the emotional state of the wearer of the scars
• her maturity and willingness to bear children

I believe the last point is the reason for Juliet's branding. Until it was outlawed in the late 1970’s by their native governments, the people of the Benue-Valley area of Nigeria practiced a process of female scarification called hleeta . Applied in stages beginning at age five or six, the applied patterns of raised dots symbolize within their societies the ripening and maturing of girls into womanhood and their emergence into society as marriageable women, and most significantly they publicize the realization of her reproductive nature. As we all know pregnancy on the island is a death sentence in itself. Is it possible that this is the meaning of this symbol?