Janvi Patel - Board Member for Free Periods, Advisor at Equality Now and Children of War Foundation, Ambassador for Equality and Co-Founder of Halebury law firm
Why do we have to carry menstruation products around with us? We aren’t expected to carry other washroom supplies such as toilet paper, soap or paper towels. Yet stocking bathrooms with tampons and menstruation towels seems to be a step too far for most organisations. It drives me crazy.
While I do have the financial means to purchase menstruation products and the ability to plan ahead, a busy lifestyle means that I still seem to be unprepared each month and am often caught out. And being caught out can be quite stressful. Imagine working in a corporate office over 15 floors high, where the sanitary vending machines frequently don’t work or ask for coins. Who carries coins these days? We either have to rely on other female colleagues or leave the building to go to the local pharmacy to purchase what we need. Can you imagine having to leave a meeting for 30 to 45 minutes to do that? How do you excuse yourself? It’s just insane.
“49% of girls in the UK have missed an entire day of school because of their period, according to the 2017 Plan International UK Report”
But what if I couldn’t afford menstruation products? How much more complicated do things become for low income families, for the homeless and for school-aged children? The more I started to research this problem, the more I realised just how awful the situation was. Children were losing out on their education because they couldn’t afford menstruation products and were therefore skipping school when they had their periods. Low income and homeless women were using socks, newspapers and other materials to make do.
I started to think about how the issue could be fixed. My initial thoughts centred around raising private funds to purchase menstruation products and then donating these to existing organisations to distribute. However, speaking with Jennifer Wiess-Wolf, author of Periods Gone Public, it became clear that privately raised funds wouldn’t be sufficient. Jennifer suggested that legislation would ensure a sustainable, longer term solution. After all, according to existing UK legislation, the Government had an obligation to ensure that all children went to school, and that while at school, they had what they needed to participate in a full education. In the case of menstruating girls, the Government was failing to meet this obligation. As a lawyer myself, I have always believed that laws shape our culture and what better way to address this bathroom imbalance than through legislation?
“Imagine working in a corporate office over 15 floors high, where the sanitary vending machines frequently don’t work or ask for coins”
By this point I had contacted Amika George, a teenager and activist in London who was campaigning against period poverty and working to convince the Government to provide free menstruation products to school children. Just as I started to bounce the idea with her of starting a legal campaign, we discovered that lawyer and activist, Gemma Abbott from the Red Box Project, was also planning something similar. And so, it made sense for us all to join forces. Under the umbrella organisation Free Periods we started to work together on taking legal action against the UK Government and launched a legal campaign along with a national public relations campaign to raise awareness.
“Not all restrooms are created equal”
Just three months after the campaign was launched, the Government announced that its Department of Education would be funding the provision of free menstruation products to all state-funded schools and colleges in England from January 2020 as part of its scheme to tackle period poverty. This was an incredible moment. Tampons, menstruation towels and menstrual cups are now available to order for those educational institutions that choose to opt into the scheme. Around 20% of schools in England have already signed up and we continue to push for more to do so. We are also working to support similar campaigns in other jurisdictions.
Another period activist, Nancy Kramer said, “Not all restrooms are created equal”, and that really resonates with me. While boys and men can walk into a bathroom and have everything they need, girls and women frequently do not. If we want an equal society, ensuring that bathrooms are equally well-equipped in schools for all children, so that their ability to learn is not diminished – well, this is as basic as it gets. According to Plan International UK, 49% of girls have missed a day of school due to their periods, while 10% of students aged 14 to 21 cannot afford menstruation products. This is not acceptable. I am so proud to have been part of the Free Periods legal campaign and of the impact it has made.
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