To not accept that there is 'period poverty' in the UK.....?

[rosetree7]

Fully expecting to be told I am BU, but I genuinely do not get this 'period poverty' malarkey.

Some reports say periods cost £42-45 a month (£500 a year.) Never in my life have I - or anyone else I know - spent £42-45 a MONTH on their period. Not even a tenth of that actually.

Some of the things they (supposedly) spend money on are tampons and STs (obviously...) You can get a pack of sanitary towels for less than a pound. Less than 50p in some shops!

And also mooncups.

Although mooncups cost £16 to £22, most mooncups will last 10 years, so you'd only buy 3 or 4 in your lifetime!!! And they also spend on pain relief - but paracetamol and ibuprofen are 16 to 26p a packet from Wilkos. And plenty of other shops sell them for a similar price!

Oh and apparently, they have to keep spending money on new underwear every month. What a load of shit.. I have bought 18 pairs of underpants in 5 years, (at a cost of around £25 for the entire 5 years!) 5 pairs of them are dark coloured - and I wear them for my periods. Never in my life have I bought new underpants for every new period.

So what is this all about? And how on earth are they coming up with such a ludicrous figure as £42-45 a month?! I mean, some girls are apparently using toilet roll as they 'can't afford' sanitary towels? In most cases, toilet roll is more expensive than sanitary towels FGS!

Not this convo again 😑

Do you not understand that period poverty is not just finance? Why do people always make that linear assumption.

I provide red boxes. They are always always needed.

As has been pointed out being poor costs more. You can try to budget but, often, there isn't enough to go stretch.

If you're poor you don't have access to the best utilities tariffs, you're stuck with key meters, the most expensive ones.

You don't have a car, you're stuck paying bus fairs, which means, if you live a good few quid away from Aldi, you're not likely to go as the savings you would make would be taken away in bus fare.

You can't bulk buy items to get them cheaper. There isn't a few quid spare if you spot a limited time offer on something you sue frequently.

If your oven goes you can't pay a repair man or nip out and buy a second hand one. You have to either get into debt and pay over the odds for a new one or live off microwave meals until you manage to blag a free one of Freecycle.

And don't even get me started on how much poor people are forced to pay for credit. That should be illegal.

And if you are poor and your period catches you out by starting two days early there might not be 23p left and there definitely won't be £3.23 to get you the bus down to Tesco and back.

Problem is OP how/why would young teenagers know that they could get cheap san pro at a Poundland or wherever else? And even if they have some loose change scraped together why would it be a young person's priority when she might need a pen for school or a bus fare or even a bar of chocolate or a coke when she's hanging out with her friends. You are attributing mature adult values and priorities to young women many of whom have had very different upbringings to your own.
Some of the stories on this thread are very sad.

The £42 is far more than it really costs for MOST people.

However a realistic cost for disposable products is probably around £3 per month. If you have 3 in the household needing it that's nearly a tenner. It could well be unaffordable for some young teenagers especially if their parents don't see it as a priority.

Plus the logistical problems and humiliating nature of it contribute as well - it's more of an issue than being short of some other items

Oh, also, even how much electricity you use is/can be effected by poverty.

When I first had DD, I had a secondhand fridge older than me, and no freezer, so no batch cooking, an ancient electric oven (again, I think that was older than I was), no microwave and a £5 kettle. The windows in my rented accom were crappy and rotten but I'd had to move into it because it was the only place accepting HB that didn't want a two month's rent as deposit and a month's rent upfront.

My electric key meter used £20 p/w, my gas £10 p/w in the summer, £30 in the winter (with the heating on only for three hours a night).

And there was the three months in which I didn't have a fridge or a freezer and had to buy food fresh for each day or it would go off (this was in the summer).

Now I've been a bit better situation and my house has windows which fit the frames, my washer has an economy setting and is energy efficient, ditto the fridge freezer and the kettle and my oven is gas, I use £10 p/w on each meter.

There's hidden costs to being poor which no-one ever accounts for.

It's not just about being able to budget though, it's the ability to make good choices, a work ethic etc. The budget isn't really going to get better if the person remains not working, carries on adding to their family, won't up their hours as they want to claim instead etc.

I've been on some awful budgets as left home very young, rather than go down the path of benefits I've worked some god awful jobs and had three together at one point. It's very easy to just claim benefits and blame everything on that. It's the lack of desire to want to provide for your own children I find so hard to swallow. Who on earth would not work any job whatsoever if it meant food, tampons, warmth etc for their children?

Its so much easier to take 'as and when jobs' when you have free childcare.

Boxsets did you have children when you worked 3 jobs?

However a realistic cost for disposable products is probably around £3 per month

Arghhhhhh!!!!!

The arrogance of ignoring so so many people on this thread

£3 a month I guarantee that when you get older and start flooding you'll be complaining that nobody warned you how bad it could get.

The benefits system prevents people taking as and when jobs. No-one is gonna take a month long contract covering holiday leave if it means their HB stops and takes 2-6 weeks to start up again, they have to wait up to 6 weeks for WTC and then once their contract is up, they have to wait another 2-6 weeks for their JSA to kick in again and Christ knows how long for the HB to catch up.

Universal Credit was supposed to address this but we've all heard how that's working out.

I don't know anyone in poverty who wouldn't work, if they were able but they need a steady job, fitting around available childcare with reliable hours. Zero hours contracts and companies like Tesco only taking people on on 8 hour contracts and telling them they have to be available 24/7 with only 24 hours notice, meaning they can't get a second job is pushing people who want to work out of the job market.

Stories like this have probably already been mentioned but I used to bunk off school for my period because my mum had addiction issues and wouldn’t buy anything except those £1 pads you speak of... that don’t stick in place, are as absorbent as a piece of cardboard and often end up scrunched in a ball outside your knickers. The blood sits on them, it doesn’t get absorbed. If you have a clot, that just sits either in your knickers or in your vag waiting for you to walk in the right position to run down your leg. I’d use one an hour. Mum wouldn’t buy more when they were all gone. Then I’d move to stolen tissue from the school toilets that me and my friend who was in the same position used to hoard. Sometimes I would just stay home laying down to try and stop bleeding. Every month you’d wake up to a bed entirely caked in blood.

On the face of it now, as a grown up affluent women I see these posts and think, of course someone who has never experienced that wouldn’t get it. I can barely imagine that lifestyle now with my expensive mooncup and limitless pads which thank god, actually work. But it did happen.

@BoxsetsAndPopcorn I don't know many available jobs that 1.would pay enough to cover the drop in benefits and/or childcare and 2. Would hire someone with no or very little experience/education or after a long career gap.

And childcare is fucking expensive (last time i looked the only full time nursery in the area was £47 a day) ,add in transport and other work related costs it can soon add up and you're actually losing money.

Agree. The flooding is a recent thing for me. It can be sudden, I’ve found, during a ‘normal’ period. I’ve actually discovered, very recently, as mentioned up thread, that incontinence pads are the only adequate safeguard nowadays. They are also more expensive of course.

Agreeing with an earlier post.

I'm a teacher in Europe and did a placement in a secondary school in the U.K. just over a year ago. Not a terrible school, but with an ordinary range of people struggling financially: who couldn't replace school shoes immediately if they broke, who didn't have spare cash for school trips, free school meals, food banks.

Yes, yes, yes, there is period poverty.

• parent sets aside money for pads, and buys, say, a pack of cheap sanitary towels per month (these are people who can't afford to bulk buy)
• daughter, like many teens, gets her period and stains the pair of knickers she's wearing at that moment. Pants are soaked/washed but remain stained. Daughter embarrassed by stained pants e.g. changing for P.E. or at a friend's house and generally self-conscious
• daughter then uses pads
• possibly some leaking, most likely at night, bedsheets can be soaked but not necessarily a full hot wash the next morning as washing is expensive and so you need to wait for a full load and do it in the cheap electricity hours, then wait for it to dry on a washing line / clothes horse (no tumble dryer)
• possibly another pair of pants, or pyjamas bottoms soiled at some point during the period
• all the pads are used before the period ends and there is no money to buy more / daughter has irregular periods (like many teens) and has more than one period in a month

Add to this that cheap sanpro can be uncomfortable and not the best at preventing leaks, and that the child may well not be able to take multiple showers or baths whenever they wish, or afford things like wipes or body spray/perfume just to feel less self-conscious, and you see how having periods is pretty uncomfortable and miserable if you don't have much cash.

There is certainly a proportion of school girls in the U.K. who don't have sanpro and it's great to see charities and initiatives starting up recently to help them access this.

frequency
I too am amazed that you "allow" your daughter to throw away perfectly good pants - when they can be washed and come out stain free.
If she leaks onto outer clothes, do they get replaced too? and sheets? where does it stop?

YABU. I used to have to cut up tea towels because I just didn't have money left over for sanpro.

@00100001 wherever the poster or her budget decide it stops.

I don't really allow her to, she just does. Of course, she washes them first, but she has a heavy flow and sometimes they remain stained after washing.

A multipack of Primark pants is cheaper than a tub of Vanish. The non-branded stain remover doesn't really work. If she's home when it happens, she soaks her pants in cold water and then washes them right away. If she's not the blood dries in and stains happen. It doesn't happen every month and it doesn't really bother me enough to kick up a fuss about it.

Her bed sheets are black, so it is not an issue. All her outer clothes are black. She has a white duvet cover, from a fancy designer place. If that gets stained, I wash it in bleach and/or leave it out in the sun.

If it was an issue for me, I would tell her to stop doing and she'd listen to me.

Period pants remain stained whether you have money or not. That's why my DD's have black undies specifically for periods. We wash them each night, sometimes in used bathwater, and they are dry the next morning. Simple.

Cheap sanpro is better then no sanpro.

A multipack of Primark pants is cheaper than a tub of Vanish.

Are they really

Are they really

Not just primark knickers

I volunteer for a project where we get donations of things like sanitary towels, tampons, wipes, soap and knickers and we put these boxes in schools for girls who may not be able to afford them. Many ignorant people ask this question and there are tons of answers should you wish to bother googling them but a few main ones

Lots of people aren't comfortable using moon cups (I'm not)
Some women find the cheaper sanitary products are uncomfortable/cause thrush/aren't as protective as they state they are
A lot of the cheaper products are only available in large shops and supermarkets, for people outside of London where transport is very expensive and unreliable, factoring in this cost means the products end up no cheaper
Lots of younger women are from backgrounds where they are very aware of their families situation and won't ask for products
Some young women live only with males and have no one to approach and talk to about products

Feel free to google more