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Addressing the Menstrual Needs of Women and Girls is Necessary to Achieve Gender Equality in Water and Sanitation Service Delivery
Published in Oliver Cumming, Tom Slaymaker, Equality in Water and Sanitation Services, 2018
There has been a surge of awareness-raising efforts around the issue of menstruation in schools, with numerous organizations and campaigns (e.g. WSSCC, ZanaAfrica, WASH United’s Menstrual Hygiene Day) pushing for “breaking the silence” on menstruation and the needs of girls in school. Efforts have included social media campaigns, educational gatherings focused on creating a safe space for girls and women to talk openly about menstruation (e.g. WSSCC’s menstrual hygiene labs in India), and efforts to capture and convey girls’ voiced experiences of their first menstruation and the barriers they face managing monthly menses in school. An important role of awareness raising can be the shifting of social norms around a given topic, and thus the menstrual advocacy efforts are serving to generate more open conversations and increased attention to the MHM needs of girls.
A Systematic Review of Menstrual Health and Hygiene Management (MHHM) as a Human Right for Adolescents Girls
Published in International Journal of Sexual Health, 2022
Suruchi Sood, Sarah Stevens, Maho Okumura, Michael Hauer, Astha Ramaiya
While there is ample literature documenting the relationships between MHHM and the individual development domains of WASH, health, education, nutrition, and child protection, the literature is fragmented, stems from different academic disciplines, and frames MHHM as an issue within each of the five domains. This systematic review argues that MHHM has been hitherto neglected in the overall development sphere and aims to evaluate the extent to which adequate MHHM among adolescent girls is a fundamental human right. Jyoti Sanghera stated that “Stigma around menstruation and menstrual hygiene is a violation of several human rights, most importantly of the right to human dignity” (United Nations Human Rights, n.d.). In addition to this violation of human dignity, the stigma around MHHM perpetuates violations of rights to education, health, consensual marriage, and WASH (Menstrual Hygiene Day, 2014). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a landmark document for human rights, which holds all participating nations accountable to its tenets (United Nations General Assembly, 1948). According to the UDHR, people are the “rights holders” to security, dignity, and well-being and states are the “duty-bearers” to respect, protect, and fulfill those rights (United Nations Human Rights, n.d.). Table 1 outlines the covenants, comments, and articles that are most relevant to MHHM and how the states are violating their rights as duty-bearers.
Interrogating Stigma: Menstrual Management and Maternal Masculinity in R. Balki’s Padman
Published in Women's Reproductive Health, 2019
On March 27, 2018, Tracy Dsouza’s “Girliyapa,” an online entertainment channel (on Youtube) for female-oriented content in India, released a video titled Mom, Dadi, Aur Period (Mom, Grandma, and Period) to mark the occasion of Menstrual Hygiene Day (May 28), a commemoration that was initiated by the German-based NGO WASH United in 2014 (Girliyapa, 2018).1 The video highlighted the conflicting viewpoints of Mom and Dadi in relation to Krisha’s (the principal protagonist) first menstrual period, and it garnered praise from its audiences, a noteworthy achievement that can easily be corroborated by the fact that it had almost six million views to its credit. The interest in the video underscores the increasingly palpable presence of social media and digital platforms when it comes to generating discourse about a topic that is, more often than not, considered private and most discussion about it concerns concealment (Houppert, 1999; Oxley, 1998), secrecy, exclusion, and social stigma (Johnston-Robledo & Chrisler, 2013). The widespread dissemination of such videos could certainly go a long way in educating the public and destigmatizing cultural practices that have long been associated with menstruation.