Teens…what an interesting species we are! We go from having
thousands of “friends” on social medias to break down on why we don’t have many
actual friends in real life; from being completely apathetic to cry on puppies’
videos on twitter; from laying down in bed for hours staring at the roof
thinking about all the responsibilities we avoided during the day to actually
doing something to change the world.
Amika George is an incredible example of what teens are
capable of.
Amika was just 18 years old in 2017 when she started a
campaign to end period poverty called #FreePeriods after she found out on a
newspaper that one girl out of ten in the UK uses antihygienic items like old
socks, t-shirt sleeves and toilet paper instead of pads and tampons or, even
worse, has to miss school for a week every month because she cannot afford menstrual
products.
In just a week the petition she launched received around 2.000
signatures growing exponentially ever since then. The protest spread all around
the UK and the Scottish government in August 2018 has become the first country
in the world to provide free period products in universities, colleges and
schools.
Here are some stats: an average woman spends something
around £18.000 to buy period products in her lifetime, girls are most likely to
lose 145 days of school more than their male counterparts due to menstruation
and the majority of girls (and women) are afraid to even talk about period and
ask for help.
This last stat is something really disturbing. Why does this
happen? A woman menstruates for over 6 years in her lifetime and we still have
difficulties talking about it feeling embarrassed every time. Then why is
something so natural so stigmatized at the same time?
It feels like since we were kids, we were taught that period
is something gross, something we shouldn’t talk about and even be ashamed of. To
be honest we don’t even talk about it, we whisper things and we invent stupid
nicknames for it in order to not be discovered.
Recently I read a really stupid controversy regarding a
period pads’ company commercial that came out on tv that instead of that sci-fi
blue-colored liquid that we all socially accept, showed more realistic and
controversial red blood drops and people were going literally crazy about this.
I heard people saying that they didn’t want their kids to see these kinds of
things on tv (but violent movies with splatter scenes are okay, aren’t they?),
that it is disgusting to have a commercial that shows -fake- period blood on
the tv while having dinner and so on.
What shocked me is that many of these people who were upset
because of the commercial were females.
What is fundamental in my opinion is to raise awareness and
teach everyone, boys and girls, grown men and women that periods are natural
and nothing to hide or be embarrassed of and this is something that Amika is
promoting and keeps fighting for.
Thanks to her activism something is changing in the world
and in people’s mind and hopefully one day every girl will feel free to talk
about their periods, have free access to menstrual products and have the same
education opportunities that males have for just not having a uterus.
I really thank Amika George for being a teen yet so incredibly
inspiring for what she has started at such a young age but what makes me really
admire her is that the period poverty issue didn’t affect her in first person
but she decided to fight for this cause anyway to help the ones who were
affected. This is something we should all take example from. We should fight
not only for problems that are close to our everyday life but also for those
issues that apparently do not seem to touch us directly and for those whose
voices cannot speak so loudly.
Kendra
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