LETTER | Delay no more: Stop 'period spot checks' now

LETTER | My first period was quite a memorable one: I was in Form 1 and had just transferred to a new school. It was orientation week, and I barely knew anyone. As the session ended and we stood up to leave, an Indian girl, Asha, awkwardly tapped me and whispered, “You have a stain on your pinafore.”

My face turned red. My mother had briefly briefed me on periods and what to expect, but I never expected that it would arrive on my first week in a new school. Thankfully, I had packed a sanitary pad in advance, Asha accompanied me to the washroom, and that was that.

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Month. Yet just this week, spurred by a Twitter thread which garnered 7,350 retweets, 1,956 quote tweets and 6,176 likes, came the news that girls in multiple schools across Malaysia were forced to undergo “period spot checks” to prove they were menstruating through ways that grossly violate their bodily autonomy and fall well into the realm of sexual harassment and assault. These include unwarranted groping of breasts and genitals, forced swabbing of private parts to prove menstruation and public shaming.

The bitter irony in this is that there is still resistance towards bringing sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) education into schools.

Girls receive conflicting messages about their bodies: periods are a taboo topic (god forbid the dreaded red spot on your pinafore or baju kurung!). At the same time, they are forced to prove their menstruation and publicly shamed for it. Practices like these also endangers girls’ health, as in the case of the student who reused the same pad throughout the day to make sure there would be blood during the “spot checks”.

In adulthood, women are still shamed for discussing periods or fighting period poverty (where B40 women cannot afford to purchase sanitary pads, tampons, or other products). When my team received sanitary pads donated by All-Women’s Action Society (Awam) Malaysia, we received some snide comments for displaying pads “openly”. When Wanita PKR Johor distributed pads in conjunction with International Women’s Day and to raise awareness on period poverty, a pro-Perikatan Nasional Facebook page called them vulgar names.

Simply put:

1. It is nobody’s business whether a girl is menstruating or not. Periods for some can be a minor inconvenience but terribly painful for others. If a student were to make it known, then the best approach is to support, not shame.

2. Some teachers may be perpetuating what they have experienced themselves while in school. Now that we know this is wrong, are we brave to say enough is enough? Does the Education Ministry (MOE) and the Women, Family and Community Development Ministry (KWPKM) care enough for our girls to issue a circular strictly banning such practices?

3. Normalising this blatant disregard for children’s bodily autonomy opens schools to become hunting grounds for child sexual predators. Earlier this month, my office was invited by Monsters Among Us (MAU), a youth NGO combating child sexual abuse, to support their newly launched chatbot Lapor Predator and raise awareness against child sexual abuse. Sadly, a majority of child sexual abuse cases are perpetrated by people familiar to the victims. In a brief report by The Star, “the top three perpetrators, he (consultant paediatrician Dr Amar Singh HSS) says, are the “father, father, father”, followed by stepfather, brothers, uncles, religious teachers, teachers and neighbours.”

While Lapor Predator focuses more on online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA), I would like to call on students experiencing this to report such incidents as well.

I would also like to call on all parents who do not want their children subject to the violation and humiliation of “period spot checks” to write to the MOE, and the respective State Education Departments and District Education Offices.

Ultimately, schools should be safe places where parents can trust that their children receive the best of education and best of care.

LIM YI WEI is Selangor's Kampung Tunku assemblyperson.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.