McAllister Josie, Amery Fran, Channon Melanie, Thomson Jennifer
Department of Social and Policy Science, University of Bath, Bath, UK.
Glob Public Health. 2025 Dec;20(1):2448272. doi: 10.1080/17441692.2024.2448272. Epub 2025 Jan 9.
From both an academic and a policy angle, menstruation is receiving an unprecedented level of attention. Within the academic literature, there are many different normative arguments being furthered for how menstruation be understood and framed - variously, that it should be understood as an issue of rights, justice, health or hygiene management. Yet less attention has been paid to the step preceding these normative arguments - how menstruation actually understood at present within global health policy. In this paper, we argue that, despite this proliferation of academic and policy interest, attention to menstruation is still relatively muted at the level of global health policy. Using Carol Bacchi's 'what's the problem?' approach to critical frame analysis, we show that global health policy on menstruation remains patchy, with little cohesive understanding of it as a policy issue emerging at the international level. Instead, competing constructions of it as an issue emerge, such that there is not one clear way in which menstruation is addressed in international health policy. We sketch the implications of this, arguing that without a collective understanding of the problem, solutions are likely to remain siloed, and cross-sectoral work will be difficult.
从学术和政策角度来看，月经正受到前所未有的关注。在学术文献中，对于月经应如何理解和界定存在许多不同的规范性观点——比如，有人认为应将其理解为权利、正义、健康或卫生管理问题。然而，对于这些规范性观点之前的步骤——目前全球卫生政策中实际上如何理解月经，却较少有人关注。在本文中，我们认为，尽管学术和政策兴趣激增，但在全球卫生政策层面，对月经的关注仍然相对较少。我们运用卡罗尔·巴奇的“问题是什么？”批判性框架分析方法，表明全球月经卫生政策仍然零散，在国际层面上对其作为一个政策问题缺乏连贯的理解。相反，出现了将其作为一个问题的相互竞争的建构，以至于在国际卫生政策中没有一种明确的方式来处理月经问题。我们概述了这一情况的影响，认为如果没有对问题的集体理解，解决方案可能会各自为政，跨部门合作也将困难重重。
