Advocacy Campaign Speech

Joshua Becares
Angelics 10
December 4, 2020

I am here in front of you because today I, Joshua Becares, will serve as the voice
for every person who have experienced body shaming, bullying, and
discrimination. My main goal of this advocacy campaign is to reduce these
threats because, I alone cannot stop it but I have the ability to educate and to
spread awareness about this matter.

At a very young age, I have encountered my first, but not the last, body shaming
and bullying experience. I used to be bad mouthed and insulted just for being
overweight and only for having a dark skin, I was considered ugly simply because
of that. I kept on asking myself why do I need to experience that, is it because I’m
different from the rest of them? I felt that if someone is looking at me, they are
judging me.
I am currently in this point of my life where those words do not affect me anymore,
I became accustomed and unaffected by those words. All of the negativity that
I received from them made me who I am today. I am currently a high-school
student who is attempting to roll out an improvement about this matter. I want to
make people realize that no one is ugly, everyone in this world is beautiful. I have
created some steps in order to carry out this campaign. The first step is to educate,
let us start with the members of our family, let us teach them about the
significance of acceptance and respect, and by that we can spread our
knowledge to other people. The second step is we can have a small gathering or
meeting to talk about our insecurities and we can make advices for us to deal
with them.

Bullying, discrimination, sexism, body shaming, and racism happens every day
and everywhere. More and more people are suffering from these threats, more
and more people are dying, and an ever increasing number of individuals are
having a low self-confidence, low self-esteem and may suffer psychological
disorders because of these. Let us not wait for the time when our children will have
to experience it. If we, as a small group of community work together and evolve
out from the toxicity, we can make a better future for our children. Thank you.