By Nirajana Sinha
Since a huge number of women start menstruating when they are in schools, the only logical thing to be done by the school authorities is to educate their students on menstruation, menstrual health and products. However, that is not the case in India.
A 2014 report by the NGO, Dasra, showed that 71% of adolescent girls remain completely unaware of menstruation till menarche. This lack of menstruation-related information, poor access to proper sanitary products and non-facilitating school environments makes it extremely difficult for young girls to attend schools. The same report by Dasra shows how 23 million young girls drop out of schools each year in India.
I started menstruating first during my regular school hours. Due to no prior knowledge about menarche I was, needless to say, extremely horrified. Slowly accepting the idea that I was either really ill or almost about to die, I rushed to our school’s medical department.
After asking some specific questions, the medical assistant took me to the attached bathroom, and for the first time, I was shown a menstrual pad. But what was more amusing to me was that she had to take me to the washroom to explain a normal and natural process or the pace with which she hid the product behind her when a younger male student entered the medical room. This shows how medical representatives and assistants, those who study and are well informed about this natural process, do not hesitate to perpetuate the same taboo and shame around menstruation.
The Everteen Menstrual Hygiene Survey report shows how 38% of adolescent women misinterpret menstruation as an injury or illness. This stems from the lack of awareness and conversation around menstrual health and schools do little to nothing to initiate one. Once, I had gone to a teacher for permission to sit in the last bench and not participate in the class discussions due to my excruciating menstrual cramps.
In return, the teacher lectured me on how every woman has to go through this pain, and I should not be making a huge deal about it. It is highly crucial to note that millions of women in this country have endometriosis, dysmenorrhea, PMDD (me being one of them) and other menstruation-related complications, the symptoms of which range from nausea to immense pain.
Undermining these symptoms and complications invalidates the struggles of the menstruators and even keeps them away from reaching out for help in case of further complications. Also, every menstruator’s experience is different and unique from others, and there is no one perfect or normative way to bleed.
Ill-equipped with menstrual healthcare products and even the most basic information about menarche and menstruation, India’s schools and education spaces should educate students on topics like menstruation, reproductive and sex education, have turned into hubs of promoting and perpetuating misinformation and taboos that further stigmatizes the menstruators.
In a school in Bhuj, more than 65 female students were forced to show their underpants to prove that they were not menstruating after the administration discovered a used pad in the garden. These are one of the many instances of period shaming and downright violation of a woman’s dignity and basic human rights that take place in these institutions, many of which do not even get reported.
The basic argument that these institutions make is that these conversations are not appropriate. They are trying to protect young students’ impressionable minds (I mean, who stopped menstruating or having sex because schools did not want to talk about them? No one). Terming natural biological processes, occurring vastly to women, as inappropriate is a direct way of branding women’s bodies as inappropriate (but schools are not ready for that conversation, either) and this leads to young girls believing the same and struggling with body image issues, to say the very least. Thus, it is high time schools in India (and all over the world) take sex and menstrual education seriously and start initiating a conversation around these two tabooed topics.