Discrimination beyond borders

– Nowadays, discrimination is everywhere and unfortunately still concerns too many people in the world, with a particular strength in middle schools and high schools. For this reason, a group of students from the Jean Monnet High School decided to lead an awareness campaign in order to denounce discrimination and educate young people.
– First of all, they thought about the different faces of discrimination, how they wanted to conduct their project to reach their audience, to make a real impact.
To achieve their goal, they decided to make a video as they believed it was more hard-hitting than a poster.
– Thus, their video is based on five different people who all have to face, at one point or another, different kinds of discrimination. The idea is to follow these people through high school, watch them during their studies and see how they find a job. One girl for example gets pregnant during her studies and then has deal with both her baby and her job ; another one comes from a difficult background and has to find a job to pay for her studies ; a boy learns how to assume his homosexuality ; his brother faces the pressure of rough studies and another boy struggles to find an appropriate school despite his disability.
– A student told me that "it was interesting to work on this project", firstly "because we are all concerned by discrimination" and secondly "because it was different to what we are normally used to doing in class, it is a concrete project that we will manage from the beginning to the end".
– The idea of the video is to show people that whoever we are, whether we are a girl or a boy, whatever studies we chose, whether long or short, whatever our social background or sexual orientation, whether we are disabled or not, popular or different or whatever our skin colour, we should all be given the same keys to success and that together we are stronger.
– Indeed, we CAN be stronger than discrimination. In spite of our differences, we can all achieve our goals, no matter which path we take.
– Soon, the students will be visiting other classes, among which nearby middle schools where discrimination is more present. If younger pupils become aware of the dangers of discrimination then its impact can be limited.

Daphné Cartron