Girls’ bullying video leads to healing moment
Seminar Group posts message on Youtube
The Girls’ Seminar Group at Westwood Senior High in Hudson has produced an anti-bullying video that is already directly responsible for a healing moment after only one week of being posted on YouTube.
The video is set to the haunting Cinematic Orchestra song To Build a Home and edited by Grade 9 student Victoria De Braga.
The look may be familiar to those who have seen the video made by Coquitlam teen Amanda Todd, who killed herself Oct. 10.
Todd used cue cards to tell her story about being a victim of cyber bullying. It is that cyber bullying that drove her to kill herself.
Cue cards are also used in the Girls’ Seminar video, but this time they tell the story of Grade 11 student Kelly Lopes (seen in the video holding the cue cards) and her younger sister.
“We wanted to do something original, but we also wanted to connect with people’s emotions,” said Grade 11 student Karen Mumby who shot the video.
Accompanying the cue-card storytelling are flashes of individual girls holding up positive messages “Kelly’s sister showed the video at her school and afterwards the kids who had bullied her came up to her and apologized,” Mumby said. “If even one person sees the video and thinks before (he or she) acts, we’ve achieved our goal.”
The Girls’ Seminar Group is an extracurricular group established last year by teachers Alexandra Welik and Kelly Tellier to bring girls from different grades together to discuss issues which affect them.
The Girls’ Seminar Group gives workshops in self-esteem at middle schools and will be producing another video for anti-bullying week in January.
“This (first) video is inspired by the Amanda Todd video, but her suicide is not the reason the girls made the video,” Welik said. “We’ve had an anti-bullying campaign going at the school all month with the slogan ‘Be Kind, Just Because.’
“Kids wear T-shirts with the slogan and we put banners with the slogan in the bathrooms. Girls write kind things about other girls, anonymously — it’s like graffiti, but nice.”
Mumby has not been a victim of bullying herself but she recognizes it is a negative presence at most schools.
To see the video, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP15bzcPg9M.