The girl who is missing from class on International Women’s Day

Every year on International Women’s Day my feeds fill with images of celebration. There are conferences, panels, hashtags, and headlines about women who have broken barriers and taken their place in public life. I am so grateful for every story of a woman who has stepped into the calling God has placed on her life. Yet when this day comes around, my heart is drawn somewhere else.

I cannot stop thinking about a girl whose name we will never know and whose face will never appear on a screen. In my mind she is sitting at home on a mud floor in a village in East Africa. Her classmates are at school, but her desk is empty. She has started her period, and she has nothing to manage it with.

She stays home in shame.

There is no spare money for sanitary pads, no private bathroom, no mother who was ever taught how to talk openly about these things. So she stays home in shame… and each month she slips further behind in her studies.

A doorway to exploitation.

Somewhere nearby, however, is an older man who has spotted her situation, noticed her home alone and is ready to offer what to her innocent mind looks like help—but what in truth is a doorway to exploitation.

More than ten years ago, near our offices in Kenya, we began to hear of children going missing. At the same time we were listening to girls describe how they missed around a week of school every month because of their periods. Some told us they had accepted money or favors from men simply to buy pads.

From the sickening realization that young girls were being trafficked simply because they had no sanitary products, the "Dignity Project" was born, a decision to confront both period poverty and trafficking with the hope of Christ and with something very practical a girl could hold in her hands.

Today our Dignity Days gather hundreds, sometimes thousands, of girls at a time—in classrooms, churches, slums, prisons and even refugee camps. We have now reached more than 50,000 girls across fourteen nations—from Kenya and Uganda to India, Brazil and Sierra Leone, and even in British schools where the same shame and silence so often exists behind closed doors.

Our team speaks plainly about how traffickers operate.

In every setting our team speaks plainly about how traffickers operate, about what is happening in the girls’ bodies and about the God who calls each of them by name. Police officers and community leaders often stand with us so that the message of protection is backed up by local authority, as well as by spiritual truth.

At the end of each Dignity Day, every girl receives a bright pink bag. Inside there are reusable sanitary pads, underwear and clear information on where to turn for help. The pads are designed so that they can be washed and used for around a year. It sounds so simple, yet that small bag can change the story of a life.

Attendance has risen by nearly a fifth after our events.

A girl who would have stayed home in shame can remain in school with dignity. An offer of money from an older man no longer feels like her only lifeline. In some schools in Uganda, attendance has risen by nearly a fifth after our events.

Behind the figures are stories that still move me to tears. I think of a girl who clutched her pink bag and said that now she could sit in class and study like her friends. I think of young women in a camp for people who fled the Taliban who told us they had never heard anyone speak about their bodies without disgust.

They are not dirty or ruined in the eyes of God.

I think of girls who have survived unspeakable abuse and who stand a little taller when they hear that their bodies belong to them, that they are allowed to say no, that what was done to them was unjust but that they are not dirty or ruined in the eyes of God.

On International Women’s Day the world says that women and girls matter. As followers of Jesus we know that is not just a slogan, it is the story we live in. From the first page of Scripture we see God creating men and women in his image.

At the cross we see the Son of God pouring out his life to rescue us. When we stand in front of a hall full of teenage girls and say that no one can ever put a price on their bodies because the highest price has already been paid by Christ, we are not dealing in vague religious ideas.

Jesus calls them his daughters.

We are simply explaining what the Bible tells us to be true. Jesus calls them his daughters, and he is the one who decides their worth—not any man, not any culture and certainly not a trafficker.

So, this International Women’s Day I thank God for every Christian woman on a platform, in a pulpit, or in a boardroom. But my prayers are still for the girl whose chair is empty and whose future is quietly slipping away. 

Becky Murray is the founder and CEO of Christian Non-Profit One By One, which works to end trafficking and exploitation. She founded the Dignity Project, equipping girls with reusable sanitary products, education and the gospel so they can stay in school and stay safe from traffickers. Find out more at www.onebyone.org.