when was the last time you talked about your period I do it all the time even when no one's really listening but it's not just the graphic details of my monthly bleed that I like to share with my slightly unenthusiastic friends and family it's something else it's a hidden problem an unknown crisis something you probably haven't heard of and yet is happening right here right now in the UK its period poverty at the beginning of this year I hadn't heard of it either I was sitting at the breakfast table before school watching the news is
I ate my cereal when I had to put the spoon down my jaw literally drops as I heard about girls as young as ten years old or 18 like me routinely missing school for the simple fact that they couldn't afford sanitary products when I miss just one day of school I have an insane amount to catch up on so I can't even begin to imagine what missing a week every single month must be like girls in the UK have to choose between an education they need and deserve or going to school using horrific and almost
primitive alternatives like toilet paper old socks or newspaper it's atrocious and unacceptable and needs to stop as a teenager life can be hugely challenging as I definitely know puberty parents pressure and we're only just beginning to work out who we are as people period poverty is robbing girls of a childhood and those who missed school face getting further and further behind in their educational progress and as a consequence suffer real social isolation I just couldn't believe this but what I found even more bewildering is that nothing was being done about it 800 million girls around
the world miss school for a week every single month and yet no one was trying to solve this huge problem that just shouldn't be a problem I decided to start a campaign to call on the government to give free sanitary products to all girls on free school meals I thought that if the government already has a list of the girls from the lower socioeconomic backgrounds who are most likely to be faced with this monthly monstrous difficulty surely this would be a quick and viable solution I called it hashtag free periods and starts to petition the
reaction to the campaign has been incredible I've been contacted by MPs Lords journalists and others in the public eye who want to make this issue known and fight period poverty just as much as I do when the general election was called I contacted all the political parties to persuade them to address this hidden problem and eventually three parties included in the manifesto a pledge to get rid of period poverty once and for all even more amazingly in Scotland it was announced that from 2018 they will be providing free period products in all schools colleges and
universities and soon after the Labour Party pledged to spend 10 million pounds to end period poverty in schools so real change is happening but there's still more to be done we need to make sure that the government takes action by consigning period poverty to history but we need to change our attitudes towards menstruation first in the world of period poverty I think the biggest problem is silence not talking about our periods means a quiet subservience making us complicit in society's attempt to render us peripheral and useless so we need are talking it won't be easy
though as from a young age we've been told that in this patriarchal world periods are only a women's issue so we laugh mechanically when auntie Flo comes up in conversation and we speak in hushed drug-dealer esque tones when someone ask if we have a spare pad even manufacturers of sanitary products impose this message on us creating ambiguous and patronizing packaging calling them whisper and discreet TV ads show metaphorical blue liquid drops falling from the skies onto pillowy pads while girls on their periods parachute and rock climb in ultra white hot pants if we want to
totally eradicate period poverty and snatch the taboo around menstruation we need to tell everyone about our periods together we can make periods as normalized and ordinary a subject is what we had for dinner last night because if women start making periods just an everyday thing young girls boys and men will too I dream of a day where all women can free the tampon from the inside of their sleeves and wave them in the air as they march the toilet but but I also dream of a day where not a single girl on earth will miss
out on an education or a childhood just because she was born with a uterus thank you you
