In an opinion piece for Newsweek, Jennifer Weiss-Wolf (NYU Brennan Center) highlights here the ways that jail officials are withholding menstrual products from detainees, including those arrested in recent protests. Here is an except:
Just last week, a New York City student shared with me a harrowing experience of being arrested and held in police custody while protesting on her period. She told me officers denied her a pad and even toilet paper, though she begged for them. Eventually, she said, she was left to struggle to remove her saturated pad while handcuffed—with the help of a cellmate and in plain sight of all in the overcrowded quarters—and free bleed for the duration of her detainment.
In early June, a tweet went viral, racking up nearly a million likes and comments, from an Atlanta woman who posted that she was taken into custody for going out to buy tampons after curfew, jailed for 14 hours and berated by police for “being unprepared” for her period.
The full piece is available here.
