Representation of Violence as Motivation and as Experience During the Migrants’ Journeys from Central America to the United States in Three Selected Sources

Thousands of people including women, boys and girls from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala are now on the way to find a safe place and better life outside of their home countries, exposing themselves to multiple forms of violence without ‘legal’ protection. Various reasons of the migrants leaving their homeland and violence on them have been disclosed through sources such as media, institutional reports and research. As the number of migrants of specifically women and young are growing, their experiences should thoroughly be comprehended and represented in a prism of gender and age/generation. This research conducts a literature review focusing on three different channels: academic literature, non-governmental reports and documentary films. The study explores how is violence that surrounds young people’s especially young female migrants’ decisions to emigrate, and that is experienced during migration trails, which was addressed in the selected sources. It also seeks whether a relationship between violence, youth and gender in the context of migration has been described by the authors. The research reveals that many selected sources did not use gender and generation as an analytical lens for analysis of experiences of migrants. Also, most of the sources framed migrants as victims who are likely to be recognized as ‘passive’ and ‘vulnerable’ objectives, while the few authors captured that migrants’ agencies implement countermeasures against violence during the migrant trails.