When boys and girls reach puberty, their bodies go through many physical changes. But for girls in Africa, the onset of menstruation can bring with it discrimination, unwanted sexual advances and the end of their education. Now a pilot study in Ghana says
When boys and girls reach puberty, their bodies go through many physical changes. But for girls in Africa, the onset of menstruation can bring with it discrimination, unwanted sexual advances and the end of their education. Now a pilot study in Ghana says it doesn’t have to be that way.
The study says when free sanitary protection is provided to secondary school girls there is a sharp drop in absenteeism and increased participation in household chores and socializing.
Oxford University Professor Linda Scott led the study, which involved more than 180 girls in four remote villages in Ghana. She says menstruation is often a taboo subject.
“I think it’s a combination of its links to sexuality and its links to bodily outputs. We don’t usually like to talk about bodily outputs or sexuality. And of course the fact that it affects females also has a tendency to make it more stigmatized, particularly in a developing nation context,” she says.
Cost and lack of availability are two reasons rural girls in poor countries go without sanitary protection.
Scott says, “It’s so much something that people take for granted. And even in the poor nations, people who would be middle class, and therefore government workers and NGO workers, they also would tend to take it for granted…. Also because it’s a taboo subject, it’s not something people talk about. So it tends to be invisible.
What’s more, Professor Scott says girls are perceived differently once menstruation begins.
“Part of the problem is that the onset of menstruation in remote areas of Ghana is taken as signifying the coming of actual adulthood in a way that we don’t recognize it in the West. We don’t think of a 12 or 13-year-old girl as being marriageable or sexually available. But actually in this context it’s a signal that she’s both,” she says.
