Friday, 18 October 2019

TEEN HEROES - AMIKA GEORGE





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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