The social representations of childhood in the Brazilian migratory process: stereotypes and prejudices.
social representations; childhood; migration.The present dissertation aimed to identify the social representations of childhood in migratory processes, especially forced ones. Therefore, we use the Moscovici Theory of Social Representations (1989), which has a social perspective, shared by a group, to understand the acquisition of new knowledge. The qualitative research was carried out through the form in Google Forms with 136 university of higher education institutions of the South Fluminense region of Rio de Janeiro. To identify the social representations of the refugee child we used free evocation and open questions tasks. The study participants were mostly female and of the humanities field. Most say they know the object studied mainly through the media. The analyses carried out, both the content analysis of the open questions and the evocation, identified the social representations that show a possible central core related to sadness, suffering, fear, pain and a peripheral nucleus related to hunger, hope, war, despair. We verified there is a stereotype that relates negative elements to the image of the refugee child very related to the conditions in which those children are presented by the media.