Student Bushra Mahnoor packs supplies for menstruating women and girls caught up in Pakistan’s floods. Menstruation is a taboo topic in the country.As massive floods swept through Pakistan, submerging large swathes of the country underwater, university students Bushra Mahnoor and Anum Khalid learned that some women in Balochistan province’s relief camps were resorting to leaves and used rags to manage their periods.
But Mahwari Justice – Mahwari being the word for menstruation in Urdu, Pakistan’s national language – has also sparked a social media debate over the necessity of period supplies in disaster relief kits, with some Twitter commentators calling such products a “luxury” and “unnecessary”, saying they take away funds from food and shelter needs.
A Unicef poll found that 49 per cent of women and girls in the country had no knowledge of menstruation before their first period. According to Mahwari Justice’s Khalid, a 23-year-old architecture student in the city of Multan in Punjab province, the stigma surrounding periods, coupled with the reality that most relief workers are men, made it difficult for women in flood-battered areas to raise menstrual health concerns.
Issues relating to privacy and safety around menstruation have also sprung up in disaster relief contexts. A menstrual hygiene study published in Waterlines - a journal about water supplies and sanitation - during the emergency response to the 2012 floods in Assam, India, found that women reported that a lack of private spaces had made it difficult to wash, dry and change their period cloths.
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