LET’S END PERIOD POVERTY There’s an urgent need to get rid of the negative perception surrounding the issue VUYILE MADWANTSI
ANNIKA GORDON Unsplash
IT'S easy to hate your body for something so natural because you don’t understand it. Period talk is not a woman’s responsibility. “You’ve probably heard a lot about menstruation, but you probably don’t know what it is, what the basics are. We are just going to start off with the fundamental basics of why you menstruate and what is menstruation” – ‘Flow the book about menstruation’. While menstruation is a
normal and healthy part of life for most women and girls, in many societies, the experience of menstruators continues to be constrained by cultural taboos and discriminatory social norms. Candice Chirwa is a South African menstruation activist, speaker, and academic who is working to de-stigmatise menstruation while also advocating for an end to period poverty in the country. “We need to change the language where menstruation is concerned. Already the assumption
is that menstruation is just a woman and girl's issue, and that in itself is exclusionary” said Chirwa. Because there are people that menstruate who don't identify themselves as women and girls, and there are transgender people who do menstruate, it is important that we remove the language that menstruation is a women and girls issue because it then places a priority as a human rights issue. Period poverty is an issue that deserves national and international priority and solving but beyond that, think of the language we use
