A GRIM portrait of educational bureaucracy has surfaced involving an 11-year-old girl sitting in her own blood. The child – and I stress the word child – was left to bleed on her classroom chair by a teacher. She was not allowed to go to the bathroom without a toilet pass – something only granted on the provision of a £15 doctor’s note. In Hastings Academy, nature is not tolerated outside of allotted comfort breaks. If you want to experience your first menstrual period with dignity, you best cross your legs and hope you can keep everything in until break time.

This, as anyone who has experienced the infuriating unpredictability of the female anatomy will attest, is nonsense and entirely at odds with how the female body works. When your period starts, nothing is keeping it in. Not shame. Not kegels. Not woefully inadequate school policy that seems entirely ignorant to the anatomy and physiology of girls and women.

This story has infuriated me beyond measure. It’s stirred up something Proustian and primal all at once: memories of my own teenage brush with school rules and the sleeping lioness that exists in the core of all mothers. If any teacher pulled that nonsense with my own daughter, also aged 11, also experiencing the surprise and judgement of her rapidly changing body, I’d be licking their remnants from my paws for a week.

To any local authorities, teachers, MSPs, parents, and indeed anyone with input into what a school permits and does not permit, listen up: if a school policy disadvantages one group of pupils through existence alone, what you have there is a junk policy that needs to be binned immediately. If you are writing policy without considering the needs of the diverse group it will impact, it is also a junk policy. If you haven’t fully grasped what human rights look like in practice, stop, put down that pen. If you cannot see why this is a problem, you have no business writing the rulebook. Heck, I’d argue you have no business in education, period.

To any parents reading this, this is what I want you to tell your daughters: if you need to leave, you get up, and you leave. If you are in a situation where you are suffering or uncomfortable because someone says you have to be there no matter what, stand up and walk out. No one, not an employer, not a teacher, a date, a friend or a stranger can hold you hostage like that. You are allowed to set your own boundaries, and you do not have to sit with your discomfort because it would cause trouble to dissent. You absolutely do not need to grimace through your period, or anything else that impacts you unduly, because a teacher is out-of-touch with the genuine needs of the group in front of them. Remind them by walking out of that classroom.

Now if your daughter is anything like mine, she will not want to cause a fuss. Despite my best efforts, she still struggles with the idea of confrontation and with the need to please other people. What you have to do as a parent is remind her that it is okay to take action. It is okay to do something other than wishing for a situation to be over quickly. If she is being mistreated or made uncomfortable by the words, actions and policies of another person or institution, she can go. Nothing was ever changed by sitting quietly and hoping for the best.

This is about more than periods and school policy. As one Twitter user noted, this is about drawing your boundaries and feeling empowered to show up for yourself when they are ignored. Reaffirming your boundaries is a life skill. Girls learn to smile through their discomfort, to keep their heads down, to wish they could be anywhere else in a moment because it’s what society expects of them. It’s what is rewarded by the patriarchy and what signs them up to a lifetime of promises to other people they dare not break. We can only change that by encouraging them to take action when they are in situations that are intolerable to them.

Think of how many times someone has held you hostage, emotionally or socially, in ways big or small. How many dates have you stayed on, even though you got a bad vibe? How many skeevy bosses have you tolerated because you don’t want to cause trouble? How many times have you wished that a particular person would read your obvious cues and just stop talking to you?

I still have to practice this as a grown woman, but the earlier you do learn it, the better. It does get easier. Always remember that you’re important and that your boundaries are too. And girl, remember you can always, always get up and leave.