By Nina Goodman Egreteau
Towards the end of last year (2024), our group started working on including our focus group’s missions into the critical perspectives and global politics curriculum. As a service, we believe it is important to spread our mission around the school, informing students about issues such as menstrual shaming, sustainable menstrual products, and period poverty. For this project we wanted to focus on menstrual shaming, putting a lens into a recent case study involving the Sabarimala Temple. This case was originally brought to us by a grade 12 student who had just completed her extended essay using this topic. We wanted to incorporate this case study because it was a recent directly relevant issue. The Sabarimala temple is a Hindu temple in India that restricts entry to all women of menstrual age (10-50 years), however, debate has risen surrounding these rules leading to an involvement of the Supreme Court. In our resources, we provided articles and videos that provided students with detailed information about the issue. The students also needed to explore the Convention of Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW treaty) and find relevant aspects of it concerning menstrual shaming.
