To fight against menstrual precariousness, Puy-de-Dôme is installing a distributor of periodic protection – sanitary napkins and tampons – in all its colleges, for the 14,000 schoolgirls in the department. This is a first on a departmental scale.
20% of women have already experienced menstrual poverty. But the difficulty of access to periodic protection is ageless. 12% of young girls say they did not go to class because they had no protection. It is therefore to fight against this phenomenon that Puy-de-Dôme installs distributors in public colleges.
– Justine Leblond
Lifting the taboo of menstruation
The objective is also to lift the taboo of menstruation, a subject that remains sensitive even in 2022, and even more among college students. At the Collège la Charme, for example, in Clermont-Ferrand – where the first distributor was installed – Alia, 13, never talks about her periods with her classmates. And she’s not the only one. Nafouenta and Mervé, both in third grade, explain that they fear teasing.
Between the sixth and third, most girls have their first period. Agnès Miramon, school nurse, has been managing this discovery for 25 years. “I have been distributing tampons or sanitary napkins to young girls for 25 years, who are either surprised by the arrival of their periods, or in precarious conditions and therefore cannot afford to buy them”explains the nurse. “So that we put a distributor and that the schoolgirls can be autonomous, it’s a good thing.”
This is typically one of the daily problems that we encounter. Why does it happen? Why is it like this? Do boys also have their periods? There are things that seem absurd to us and yet these are questions that middle school students ask us. We respond piecemeal, by making diagrams for example. – Agnès Miramon, school nurse at La Charme middle school in Clermont-Ferrand.
Facilitate access to periodic protection
The department estimates that 30% of college girls will use these dispensers. They are installed in places “easy to access”. At La Charme college, for example, it is found in the toilets.
€57,000 were hired by the department to finance the installation of distributors and their restocking of sanitary protection. All puy-domois colleges will benefit from it by the end of the school year.