What is prejudice?
A prejudice is often a judgment or assumption that people make about someone or something before they actually have enough knowledge to be able to say something accurate. Prejudice is often because of gender, age, race, religion, social economic status, sexual orientation or looks. So what people THINK they can see about the person/thing and what they think is obvious to them, without really knowing if it is the truth or not. This could also be referred to as discrimination or even stereotyping and often brings people apart as the human race tends to socialize with people that are more or less similar to themselves.

Superficial
There is prejudice everywhere and in every country and it is often towards the minorities or humans that have a difference in appearance, so the prejudice is often superficial. Humans often experience things with their eyes and therefore when they see things that are different it catches their attention, some people will be curious and want to know more and some people think it is ‘wrong’ and therefore start with a whole prejudice session in their mind, which then can end out being suppressed or expressed towards the person.

Racism
One very common prejudice people have is towards people from a difference race/religion and here it is often referred to Muslims which are in the spot light at the moment. After the 9/11 there has been even more increased focus on the negative views towards Muslims and just overlooking the individual. People tend to just put all Muslims into a box that says terrorists and not wanting to have anything to do with them.

Research
In 2008 there was a done a very interesting study, where there were over 1200 Dutch adolescences in the age from 13 to 17 years of age that where given a questionnaire and asked about their feeling about Muslims and 54% reported a negative feeling towards the Muslims, just because of their religion and here we are talking about people from 13 to 17 years. http://ics.uda.ub.rug.nl/root/Articles/2008/VelascoGonzalesK-Pre/?pFullItemRecord=ON

Education
We have to get better at educating people and showing them that all people are equal, no matter what race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or age you have. And that we have to get better at getting to know the inside of a person/group before judging them just on what we initially see. This could be done by going to schools and giving a short lecture telling about the differences of people, showing photos and video clips to the children that they can relate to, so that they start seeing these Muslims as fellow humans and not just as people put into a box.

Meeting people
Some people have also just their whole life only lived in places where they were not confronted directly with people of other identity groups than themselves and then when they are, they are the first ones to judge the ‘strange’ people. So a good way to do this is to make people from different groups meet each other and give them the change to interact with each other. A good example could be at volunteer activities where the whole family can participate and therefore children get to see from they are young on, that not all people look the same, but that we all have to accept each other as we are.