The Young Girls Forced Into Sex For Sanitary Products

Period poverty in Kenya is leaving teenage girls with little choice but to sleep with older men for money to buy tampons and pads, new Unicef research has revealed.

- Anna Silverman

MARGARET * WAS 13 when she agreed to sleep with a man who approached her for sex in exchange for money. Her period had started and it was the only way she’d be able to buy sanitary pads.

‘In the classroom, boys were laughing at my skirt as the blood had soaked through,’ she tells Grazia. ‘This man was in the road, seducing and persuading me as I was on my way to school.’

Now 14, Margaret, who lives in Embakazi, just outside the Kenyan capital Nairobi, says thinking about the incident makes her feel ill. ‘I was afraid. He used me, harassed me and touched my body and then paid me 150 Kenyan shillings [£1.15]. When I remember it now, I get a stomach ache.’