Qualicum Beach teen draws on personal experience to create bullying video

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WATCH: Grade 12 student Emily Godfrey is a finalist in the SOS Safety Magazine scholarship video competition.

Seventeen-year-old Emily Godfrey is now a well-adjusted young adult, but her younger years weren?t so kind.

She was diagnosed with hearing loss when she was six years old. She needed hearing aids and that?s when the taunting began.

“So I had this little teddy bear clasp that was attached to strings that would connect to my hearing aids, which back then we?re pretty chunky at the time with that technology,” said Godfrey. “They would say like ‘oh Emily?s got aids.’ It wasn?t a good time.”

Then due to family circumstance, she would move from school to school, even to Mexico then back to Canada.

The taunting and bullying continued until she entered high school.

“I think it caused me to have a lot more social anxiety than what might?ve been natural for me,” said Godfrey.

She is now sharing her trials and tribulations in a video she created for a competition, with a prize of a $5,000 scholarship that could help her enter university next year.

“I wanted to express some vulnerability so I could help people resonate with my experience so I was mainly focusing on elementary school,” she added.

The poignant 10-minute video even reaches out to bullies themselves.

“People really never know what?s going on in someone else?s life and so even a bully might be going through some hardships in their life but they?re just reacting to it differently. So I just thought if I could make this video and maybe they would see it and see how it affects a person,” said Godfrey.

Emily is now one of six finalists for the SOS safety magazine scholarship.

You can find more information at https://sossafetymagazine.com/vote-2018/

Dean StoltzDean Stoltz

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