Login
Raise awareness of personal safety for girls and issues surrounding that particular problem
Our Social Issue
We chose 'personal safety for girls' because it emerged to be a current issue that impacts a lot of people in society today including our close friends. We believe it is very relevant for young girls to know how to avoid or be able to escape dangerous situations. It is important to spread awareness for those who need it to make the world a better and safer place for all. We found out that many young girls tend to feel uncomfortable or unsafe in the local community. We hope our video help to raise awareness of that issue. We also believe it would give some advice to individuals and hopefully it could result in actions to be taken to ensure feeling of security in the future. We learned more through asking questions to our friends/peers to find out how they felt about this social issue. We also felt that this video would be helpful as we wanted to raise awareness in our local community of young girls who find themselves trapped in unsafe/ dangerous situation. As we progressed with the project it really stroke us how many young girls do not feel safe or comfortable walking alone even during daytime in our locality. We believe every person should be allowed to feel safe in their local community, local amenities etc. There are way too many attacks/ assaults we all hear of - girls don't feel safe even existing at this point and it is not okay! Our class came together to create a video for people to watch because we felt that this was the best way to convey our message to a wider population.
Who We Worked With
In the process of our YSI project we contacted the school management to set up a social media account but that wasn't allowed so we used the existing school accounts to post our video through our IT person in the school. We worked very well together. We let everyone have their opinions expressed and we all worked to come up with the idea and the final project. We planned everything like the plot, questions, answers and planned out the layout of the video. We made sure everyone that was to be on camera was comfortable doing so. We reviewed the project couple of times and any new adjustments were made. We learned that for the project to work we all have to cooperate together, listen to each other ideas, ask who would like to do which role and review our plan couple of times to make improvements.
How We Communicated
The main message of the project was to share useful tips for school-age girls to use if they find themselves in a dangerous area or environment. Our target audience are school going girls that walk through areas that may appear threatening or make them feel uneasy, such as the town park or a dark remote road to name a few. We communicated with our peers, wider school community, friends and family. We used the internet to attract the audience and to allow it to benefit from our video to inform young girls about the dangers of being alone or occupied by music or devices. We interviewed our classmates, acted out scenes, and researched different ways of self-protection so that we could clearly communicate our message to others. We filled our video with text, colour and different school scenes to add a variety of visual effects. We also added subtitles of questions and answers so that the message is clearer for anybody watching. We included different speakers to hear different opinions and more ways to stay safe. We sent our finished product to the IT teacher to put up on our school social media accounts (like TikTok, Instagram etc.) so that the wider community of Tralee could benefit from our project and it would raise awareness of the issue. We got some great reviews from students, teachers and parents about the video.
Our Innovative Action and Impact
Our team achieved what we wanted because we produced quite a good quality video that we were all proud of. Our actions were effective because many people saw the video and gave positive feedback, some even tried out the safety techniques we demonstrated. Our project has changed our thoughts on the issue, we now feel safer as we are aware of how we can protect ourselves in unsafe situations. Our project has changed our thoughts on personal safety as we are now more aware of dangerous situations and how to defend ourselves. Our team has successfully spread awareness for personal safety for girls by posting a video onto social media platforms and providing information on how we can stay safe and how to avoid unsafe situations if possible. We know we could have add an awful more but that would make the video long and nowadays it is much more effective to create multiple but shorter visuals so maybe we could have created few more videos to follow up on the matter. It was an enjoyable experience, we earned a lot from each other by sharing ways of protecting ourselves...We have become closer as a class as a result of the YSI project.
