Criminal girls and teenagers in the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1984)

Abstract

The Brazilian Military Dictatorship went deeper in the criminalization of poverty process, joined with its National Security Ideology and the necessity of control of the social order. Its ideology about children criminality was defined by characterizing the poor minors as potential criminals, as “social problem” and as “guilty” of their own marginality. And, although the laws and the jurists talked about re-education and not about punishment, the dictatorial and repressive context and the speech that projected an image of the children as “social faulty product” made that a penal-retributive dynamics never abandoned the real treatment. Our questions are, what was the position of the criminal girls and teenagers in that universe?, did they receive the same treatment that the boys?, or did the Dictatorship project other ideologies and politics on them?