Crianças que migram: um estudo sobre a participação infantil na integração de famílias refugiadas e portadoras de visto humanitário no Brasil

Abstract

This study investigates the spaces of participation of children in situations of forced displacement in Brazil, analyzing their active role in the local integration processes of their families. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Childhood Studies, the research adopts social cartography as a methodology to map children’s trajectories and mediations. The analysis shows that, despite adult-centered structures and a context marked by gaps in public policies, children exercise agency by acting as translators, cultural mediators, and facilitators of access to rights, thus leading family reintegration processes. Their participation, however, is ambivalent: experienced both as recognition and as burden, and deeply shaped by intersections of gender, race, and nationality. The school emerges as a central and contradictory locus in this process, simultaneously a space of reception, language learning, and sociability, and a stage for discrimination and xenophobia. The research concludes that local integration is largely sustained by children’s strategies that fill institutional gaps, shifting onto families responsibilities that should be borne by the state. The findings reinforce the need for intersectoral public policies that, grounded in listening to children, guarantee their rights and support their families, recognizing them as legitimate and fundamental social actors for just integration.