We are a group of Year 11 Global Perspectives students and for our group project we decided to talk about stereotypes and prejudices. It’s a topic that is very relevant in our age group; this is why we thought that it would be useful to share it with the rest of the students from our school. 

We all know that it’s inevitable for each of us to judge someone else for something they did; or to assign a stereotype which has been fixed in our heads by society to them.

Most of the time we are just giving out superficial judgments to people we know very little about. For example if you see someone with glasses and braces you immediately think of them as a nerd; or if a woman is wearing particularly short and tight clothing and is standing on the side of a street at night, in our minds we automatically give her the label of a prostitute.

Did it ever occur to you that that girl may be underage and is waiting for her parents to pick her up after a party? Or that the ‘nerd’ is a common person that has minor problems like crooked teeth and myopia?

In other occasions, when we are with very close friends, we may get carried away with gossiping about people and involuntarily we may get too offensive. If for some reason the person you have offended finds out what you said, how would you feel? Would you be fine with the fact that it was you who said such terrible stuff? How do you think the other person would feel?

Many times by joking we may make up weird stories, which are the result of our fantasies, and many times a joke may be misunderstood and it may turn into a rumor.

It’s sad to say out loud but we have been taught how to think by society, that we forget to think by ourselves. It’s true that you can’t control yourself in each and every moment of your life but you have to be conscious of what you are saying.

As many year 12’s and 13’s know,  for this project you need to have a final outcome, ours was to raise awareness about this issue because obviously its unsolvable; society will always change and the messages diffused by it are unstoppable.

The only thing we can do as human beings is remember that we have our own minds, created to make us think. We are all different people and we all have different thoughts, ideas and moral values; so why are we letting society conform our thoughts, bringing us to conclusions that we wouldn’t consider if we just stopped to think?