If you’ve heard that women are changing their profile pics on Facebook to images of sanitary towels and wondering why, it’s because period shaming has reached an alarming new low in India.
Earlier this month in a rubber factory in Kerala, 45 women were allegedly strip searched by their two female supervisors in order to identify which of the workers was menstruating, after a stained sanitary pad had been left in the toilet, the Huffington Post reports.
The women refused to admit which of them was ‘the culprit’ and so they were reportedly forced to strip and be intimately examined. As well as this incident, the workers have also reported generally poor working conditions - being allowed to go to the bathroom only once a day, even when menstruating.
One of the women filed a complaint to the police, although the company is denying the allegations, saying that the CCTV in the factory proves the incident never took place. The marketing manager of Asma Rubber Plant Limited has suggested that the women simply invented the incident because they had beef with their supervisors and wanted to get them sacked. Seems like a pretty elaborate fib for the women to come up with, to us, but police are now investigating the claims.
Female activists in Kerala have responded by changing their facebook profile pictures to images of sanitary towels, some stained (shock, horror) in order to show their support for what is a natural, inevitable, and pretty rubbish part of being female, but shouldn’t be treated like a plague in the workplace.
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Picture: Ada Hamza
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.