Period Discrimination Exists Even In 2022: Husband Forces Wife To Sleep On Ground

Around 50 percent of the world's population undergoes periods every single month. Menstruation is a biological process, even then, women still have to deal with period discrimination. Misconceptions and outdated views condition people to see periods as dirty and sadly, we have not been able to overcome this mindset even in 2022. Recently, a woman alleged that her husband forced her to sleep on the floor when she was menstruating.

While the news of a single dad reaching out to strangers on Reddit and asking for advice to help his daughter with her first period was heartwarming, on the other side of the coin there are women who still facing period discrimination in day and age.

Husband forces wife to sleep on ground

A 35-year-old woman from Ahmedabad, Gujarat filed a complaint with the police in which she alleged that her husband, a pharma company executive, would beat her over petty issues and that she was discriminated against based on her religion. The woman also added that she was forced to sleep on the floor when she was on her period.

The complainant said in her FIR that she had married in 2010 and divorced her first husband in 2018. They had an eight-year-old child together. She and her second husband, the pharma company executive got married in 2019 with the consent of both families.

Reportedly when she would stay at her in-laws’ place with her son, they would force them to stay in separate rooms whenever they had guests. The FIR states that they separated the mother and child to hide the fact that their son was married to a woman who already had a child.

She also alleged in her FIR “Whenever I got my period, I was not allowed to sleep on the bed or sit on a chair or sofa. I was forced to sit and sleep on the floor as they consider periods to be impure.” She alleged that she was not allowed to practice her religion at her in-laws’ place.

In 2021, the woman’s husband assaulted her and abandoned her after she opposed the discriminatory behaviour. Since then, she has been living with her parents and decided to file a complaint for domestic violence against her husband, mother-in-law, and father-in-law.

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Period Discrimination

In a horrific blend of ignorance about periods and the obsession with ‘purity’, a woman was forced to sit and sleep on the ground because her husband and in-laws believed “periods to be impure”. The stigma around periods is so strong, it gets to dictate women's lives and behaviour of their family members.

One would assume that a man who works in a pharma company would be well-versed in topics pertaining to health and the human body. However, education does not necessarily mean that a person is open-minded and rational.

Period Stigma

By treating periods as a taboo topic and barring women from kitchens and temples when they are menstruating, periods are associated with uncleanliness and impurity. Women are forced to use code words for their periods because society finds menstruation so filthy, it doesn't even want us to say its name out loud.

Rather than treating periods as impure and labelling menstruating people as “dirty” or “unclean”, it is about time we treated periods as a natural body process. Jokes about a person being on their period if they are aggressive or sensitive are crass and dismissive of the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome (PMS).

Instead of casting shame and discriminating against women when they are on their period, people can simply treat them with the same amount of respect they should any other day.

Views expressed are the author's own.