On a sunny morning of May, Rodela, a second-year Biochemistry student, woefully realized she had got her period during her class. Quietly, she stood up, without trying to draw much attention from her classmates, and approached her teacher with the request of being allowed to leave the classroom for some time.
The teacher declined her request and in an unreasonably loud voice, told her to go back to her seat. Rodela, already in physical pain, begged her teacher to let her go outside as it was an emergency. With a cruel smirk on his face, the teacher then asked her to share the emergency with everyone in the class as only then would he allow her to leave the classroom.
In another part of the city, in another institution, Mithila went to her teacher, a female faculty this time, and asked for permission to leave class early as she was having severe period cramps while also bleeding profusely. The teacher, with an inexplicable anger in her voice, told Mithila to stop lying and go back to her seat.
These seemingly isolated incidents sound like made-up stories but these are the harsh realities of women in Bangladesh who are regularly subjected to mockery, indifference, and even hostility, simply because the largest fraction of our population refuses to have education and empathy regarding menstruation.
So how do we solve a problem that is still not registered as a crisis in our society?
According to icddr,b, among 1,255 adolescent girls aged 12 to 16 years, almost 64% experienced at least one menstrual disorder. 56% suffer from painful periods or dysmenorrhoea. Researchers found that one in three girls experienced painful periods during three or more menstrual cycles while 9% reported persistent menstrual pain.
We decided to team up to conduct a short study on the level of education and empathy the general public has regarding periods. The findings are both shocking and frustrating as they reveal that despite being in 2026, a woman’s period continues to be a forbidden topic in our society.
Almost everyone remembers their first day of school, the first day of college, and about 50.85% of the population of this country surely remembers their first period. Some of them went to their mother, siblings, teachers, or friends, with a few even thinking they were going to die.
In some societies, periods call for celebrations of adulthood. In some other societies, periods are considered impure. But mostly, in greater social systems like ours, periods are still an entrenched taboo.
One thing has certainly changed: More people are now talking about it. Nonetheless, even among those who now speak openly, the discomfort does linger.
According to the findings of our study, only 30.6% said they had never felt embarrassed or stigmatized around the topic, while 52.8% admitted they once did but had "evolved" past it. The taboo, it seems, does not disappear; people simply learn to carry it quietly.
As part of the study, we also interviewed some of the elder or younger brothers about their sister’s menstrual health. The answers were mostly the same. Most of them never even knew why their sisters were in bed for the whole day.
One term “shorir kharap” was used by all of them to express what they knew about menstruation. Our survey echoed this ignorance almost word for word.
Several respondents pointed out that boys grow up with no basic knowledge of menstruation and many felt the silence itself was the problem. The overwhelming suggestion was to teach both boys and girls about periods as a normal fact of life.
We further interviewed a few school teachers from some government and non-government institutions. According to the head teacher of Kishoreganj-02 Boro Ajoldi Government Primary School, girls who recently got their periods would claim to be randomly sick if they missed classes or exams.
The reason is evident: It is still too shameful or too much information for a girl to share that she was having period cramps.
Azrin Karim, a final year student from Shaheed Mansur Ali Medical College, Uttara, Dhaka expressed her concern for her fellow classmates who frequently miss classes because of period cramps. Unless it is a critical situation, which happens mostly because of menstrual complications, students try not to miss exams.
Menstrual complications are not the only thing that hampers academics. From the respondents we reached out to, we learned that menstrual problems also brought forth mental health problems.
Girls who went to all girls school felt much more secure during periods rather than those who went to combined (male and female) schools. From one of our respondents, we found out that the respondent’s friend gradually started isolating herself from her peers and at one point, even started showing a deep aversion to her school. When she was asked about it, she opened up about an insidious joke about a bloodstain on her dress going around in her school.
Once again, this is a story of millions of women living in Bangladesh. Thus, simply educating the population about the basic facts of women’s periods is no longer enough; rather, a systematic development and dissemination of period knowledge coupled with genuine empathy towards women is the need of the hour.
And this has to start from our home and seriously practised in our formal institutions. The solutions are simple, affordable, and long overdue. What is missing is not the answer, but the will to treat menstrual health as what it truly is: Not a woman's inconvenience, but an education and empathy crisis hiding in plain sight.
Nadia Afroze Disha is a Lecturer at BRAC Business School, BRAC University. Afra Jabeen Rayya is a student of Brac University.
