Breaking the Period Stigma: Menstruation Globally

Suhana Bhandare
Mar 9
6 min read

As a kid, I had never been scared of blood. You probably aren’t either, I mean, do shots at the doctor’s office or paper cuts make you uncomfortable? Probably not. Anyway, I wasn’t scared, that is, until, one momentous morning in the fourth grade when I screamed at the sight of it because I woke up covered in blood, looking like someone had just stabbed me. My mother came running, my mother who never cries, and, well, she cried.

To little 9-year-old me, the whole situation was pretty bloody scary. My mother’s reaction showed me that there was a whole other dimension to the fear of blood, and a lot more people were comfortable watching Scream movies than thinking about periods. Uncomfortable yet?

A Global Perspective on Menstruation

Because of the education I received from my mother and the conversations I had with my friends as they, too, began to get monthly visits from Aunt Flo, I came to terms with the fact that I would bleed (and occasionally double over in pain) for about a week, once a month, pretty quickly.

I was fortunate enough that the community that surrounded me understood that periods were normal and healthy, but I quickly learned that many girls around the world are not so lucky. Period stigma has been a concept that women have struggled with since the beginning of time, and overcoming the shame and misinformation surrounding menstruation is a necessary step to empower women, period.

So in this Women’s Day blog post, I’ll talk about religion’s relationship with menstrual stigma, the effects this stigma has on the women of the world, and finally, I’ll address the state of the matter today.

Religion’s Influence on Menstrual Stigma

Looking around to find evidence of period stigma, as Americans, might be difficult. Women aren’t explicitly prevented from doing anything—because of their periods, at least— on a national level, and our culture is mostly accepting of the concept of menstruation. But as Americans, we live in a developed, wealthy, highly educated country where the science of periods takes precedence over myths and religious taboo.

In developing countries, the lack of access to consistent education has led a lot more people to trust inaccurate religious myths over scientific facts. That's why the map on the left, representing the development of countries according to data from the World Bank, so closely matches the one on the right, representing the strength of religion around the world based on data from a Gallup study.

Religious beliefs around periods have been passed down for generations, and many major religions associate periods with impurity:

In Christianity, according to Levicitis 15:19 in the English Standard Version of the Bible, “When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening.”
According to the Jewish Women’s Archive, The Jewish Law for Niddah, or female purity, is based on the same passage of Levicitis that I just quoted. The term Niddah, the article says, “was transformed into a metaphorical expression for sin and impurity in general. During a woman’s period, any ritual objects she touches becomes impure, and those she comes into contact with become impure as well.”
As for Islam, in Quran 2:222, a companion of the prophet urges Him to tell the people that menstruating women are impure, and to refrain from approaching them until they have been cleansed.
In Hinduism, the Veda connects the “impurity” to the Hindu God Indra’s slaughter of the dragon Vritra. It is said in the text that Indra’s guilt and self-hatred manifests itself as a woman’s monthly flow, so they, too, can feel remorseful and dirty.

Looking to anything but science for answers about periods has led to the stigma that women face today. Dependence on religion and stigma seem to have a proportional relationship. Science and stigma have an inverse relationship. The less education people receive, the more stigmatized their beliefs will be.

The Harmful Effects of Menstrual Stigma

The history of the effects of these stigmas is even heavier than a period flow. The consequences of taboos in various cultures centered around periods have physically, emotionally, and intellectually affected women. And no, I’m not ovary-acting.

Physical Impact: The Reality of Menstrual Huts

Physically, the most harmful effect of stigma has likely been menstrual huts, also known as kurmaghar or gaokar. Period huts’ emotional and potentially fatal repercussions drive many of these menstruators into depression, if it doesn’t drive them to their graves, first.

The practice, which is most common in Indian and Nepalese villages, is isolating menstruating women to prevent them from “contaminating” the rest of the village. According to my grandma, it began because many South Asian women of older generations were doing difficult manual labor to earn money; to have some relief from the work, they would stay away. But today, even though the practice has been made redundant for its original purpose by new technologies for labor and relief, these huts exist.

They are built far away from the actual village, are unstable and unclean, and provide barely any protection against the extreme weather conditions of these areas. The land around the huts is also dangerous; venomous snakes, insects, and more run rampant in many rural Indian areas. Countless women have been forced, protesting, into one of these huts only to be discovered dead or dying by the time someone has the grace to check on them. In Nepal, according to ABC news, as many as 77% of women still do this. This practice, however rudimentary it may seem to us, is still popular.

The Guardian reports that one such girl, Anita Chand, was forced into a menstrual hut. She was only 16 years old– my age– and she died because of a venomous snake bite. Nobody was around to hear her beg for help or cry in pain. Even if they were, it would have been forbidden to touch her while she bled. This happened on August 11th, 2023. Stigma is hurting women. Stigma is killing women.

Psychological and Educational Consequences

As if potentially sending these women to their deaths wasn’t enough, monthly seclusions affect women psychologically, too. The complete isolation means that a woman can’t talk with a soul for as long as she bleeds, so about 7 whole days. This means women aren’t allowed to pray in their time of need.

As FeminismInIndia articulates, it’s considered blasphemous to step inside a temple while menstruating. Seeking prasad, or a blessed offering for worshippers integral in many South Asian cultures, is similarly profane.

It also means that the younger generation misses out on entire portions of school lessons. According to The Lancet medical journals, a staggering 55% of young women on their periods in Pakistan miss school, along with 11% in Indonesia, 32.7% in Nepal, 40% in India, and 41% in Bangladesh.

Educating the younger generation is our only hope of ending the stigma, and yet stigma is the very thing preventing them from being educated. The flow of this cycle has been never ending.

But organizations today are working to eliminate stigma and their effects by educating people and working to make period huts safer.

Efforts to Eliminate Period Stigma and Promote Safety

One global organization that works to educate the population about menstruation is the SHE Global Project, which I helped create with other women in my community who realized we could work towards helping women affected by period poverty. We work with local and international institutions such as Maher Ashram (a chain of women’s shelters in India) and Rotary’s Inner Wheel to create accessible programs for people to learn about menstrual hygiene and science. We’re based in the Bay Area, and run fundraisers at community events to raise funds for pad donation.

Other organizations do their best to help women feel safer when they’re forced, which is at this point inevitable, into menstrual huts. Although these organizations tried their best to physically eliminate menstrual huts, it ended up backfiring on menstruators. Their families just exiled them to places even worse than a hut, where they became even more vulnerable. So instead, groups like the Kherwadi Social Welfare Association build safer, cleaner huts with amenities that allow these women to safely isolate themselves. The work that these groups do, I believe, is meant to supplement educational programs—cleaner huts themselves are not going to solve anything—but they do keep more women safe.

A Hopeful Future: Breaking the Cycle of Stigma

And all these women do deserve to be safe. From stigma, from snakes, and from shame. I hope that one day girls around the world will scream in joy, not fear, when they realize they’re on their period.

I hope that they’ll whine because the pain really cramps their style and not because they’re forced out of their homes and into a shack for a week. I hope that they tell their friends and siblings about menstruation and everyone accepts that periods are a beautiful fact of life that allow us all to be here today.

I hope one day periods will just end sentences and blog posts, and not lives.