Minority management strategies

the Bulletin of the Social Service for Minors and the tutelary apparatus

Abstract

This article discusses how the State managed minorities, based on the reading of the Social Service Bulletins for Minors published between 1941 and 1954, accessed through the SEADE digital library. Based on these, an attempt was made to investigate how the problem of abandoned and delinquent minors was addressed in order to also observe the means proposed for its prevention. It is, therefore, about analyzing the rationality of a knowledge-power apparatus that focused on minors and their environment, the tutelary apparatus. It is seen, then, how delinquency appears as a result of the moral and material abandonment of the child by the family. Faced with her inability to socialize her children, hospitalization is justified as a way of guaranteeing minors a favorable environment for the development and acquisition of social norms. Internment appears, therefore, as a pedagogical technique that aims to make minors citizens responsible and able to fulfill their obligations and solidary to cooperate and to conform to their position in the social structure, thus avoiding the characteristic conflict of the social question. The text therefore proposes an interpretation of the relationship between development and responsibility that underlies both the psychiatrization of childhood and the need to exercise guardianship over a portion of the population considered irresponsible and dangerous.