Thea Raisbeck, Head of Research and Best Practice at Spring Housing, discusses the need to support homelessness workers to learn and talk about periods and introduces a practical new toolkit.
Having your period when you’re homeless is BRUTAL. Honestly, male workers going red when you ask for [period] products, or like when I was in agony and had no idea why I was bleeding so much but my worker didn’t want to talk about it. I bled through my trousers – my only trousers – and had nowhere to turn…it’s like no one wants to see it.
Several years ago, I was talking to Adele* about her experiences of rough sleeping when we arrived at the topic of periods. As a long-time feminist and practitioner-turned-researcher, I felt reasonably well-versed in the separate and particular challenges faced by women experiencing homelessness. However, Adele’s contributions to my research made me reflect on the lens through which the homelessness sector tends to view periods, and how this obscures far more entrenched inequalities.
For most working in homelessness, when we think about periods (if we do at all), we think foremost of period poverty: the absence of products, facilities, and education necessary to manage menstruation safely and with dignity. This is something the sector is getting better at acknowledging and addressing. However, my work with women in Birmingham revealed another ‘poverty’ at work; a poverty of understanding, empathy, willingness and confidence to discuss, learn about, and support people with their periods.
Male workers too embarrassed to hand out period products; women experiencing severe PMS labelled as ‘difficult’ or penalised for ‘lack of engagement’; women who had experienced sexual assault being offered tampons which retriggered trauma, and serious reproductive health issues remaining unspoken and undetected for protracted lengths of time.
It’s unlikely any of these incidences were deliberate, or necessarily indicative of a lack of professionalism and care. The absence of the skills and aptitude needed to help women experiencing homelessness manage their periods safely and with dignity, autonomy, and choice is deeply rooted in stigma, and fostered by engrained taboos regarding who can talk about periods, and when.
Following my research recommendations, and parallel work carried out by Birmingham City Council Inclusion Health, Spring Housing were commissioned by Birmingham Public Health to create a Period Literacy Toolkit for the homelessness sector, which would address these issues in a meaningful, trauma-informed, and practical way.
The toolkit, published in June, was co-created with lived experience voices, homelessness workers and public health practitioners. This team of collaborators were clear that we did not want this resource to fall into the trap of being a ‘toolkit’ by name only. It is highly practical, clear, and comprehensive.
Using resources, information, lived experience, and an intersectional and gendered lens, the toolkit aims to:
- reduce stigma,
- increase staff understanding of the physical and psychological symptoms of periods,
- increase staff ability to talk about periods, offer practical support and link clients in with external support and appropriate healthcare services.
Talking and learning about periods are key elements in affording dignity and choice to women experiencing homelessness. However, equally as important is the role this can play in redressing health inequalities, and poor health outcomes.
When we are talking about periods, we are talking about an aspect of health. Yet, while health conversations are an established part of homelessness support systems, and homelessness workers are an important link into upstream health care for their clients, periods are often missed from conversations about health and lifestyle.
We hope our toolkit will change this. We know it won’t be easy, and we may all have to get comfortable with the uncomfortable sometimes, but if we are serious about equity within homelessness services, and about embedding gendered approaches, it’s a conversation we must all get used to.
Thea Raisbeck, author of the Period Literacy Toolkit at Spring Housing will be running a workshop at Homeless Link’s Health and Homelessness conference on November 3rd about the toolkit.
Other topics covered by the engaging workshop programme range from mental health and harm prevention to frontline support, the sex industry, and end of life care. You can view the full programme and purchase tickets here.