Informal settlement, Bekaa, Lebanon, May 2017. Picture by Lana Khattab. All rights reserved. Sitting inside a tent in an informal settlement in the Bekaa valley, Lebanon, my colleague and I were conducting a focus group with Syrian teenage girls. To my surprise, one young woman said that she does not shower during menstruation. Other girls in the group nodded in agreement and one girl exclaimed “you could get a sack of water in your uterus!”
While the topic of the discussion was related to water, sanitation and hygiene – or WASH, a handy acronym adopted in the international development context – findings related to misconceptions came out of what initially appeared to be more of a technical discussion. In fact, we found misconceptions relating to menstrual hygiene to be widespread across all governorates and among Lebanese, Palestinian as well as Syrian girls and women. This was not the first or only time that misinformation or ‘myths’ surrounding practices came up in our research, showing time and again that the root of gendered practices, based in social norms and attitudes, are not usually addressed by aid agencies.
Last year, a research team from Malmö University conducted an extensive study for UNICEF Lebanon, covering all the agency’s programme areas, namely child protection, education, health, WASH, disabilities, communication for development and child rights. The study is being used by UNICEF Lebanon as a baseline for their Country Programme Document 2017-2020, and by Lebanese ministries for planning and delivering services across the country.
