The origins of state regulation on the question of infancy and adolescence in Brazil and its repercussions on current public policies

Abstract

The proposal of this article is to present the results of a survey concerning state regulation in Brazil of thequestion of infancy and adolescence,  the concepts and categories present in the fi rst Código de Menores brasileiro (Code of Brazilian Minors), known as Mello Matos, of October 12, 1927, and the historical and political conditions regarding their formulation. The concepts and categories present at this regulatory mark infl uenced the entire development of the policy of attention to infancy and adolescence and conditioned the model of assistance implemented in the country throughout the XX Century. Infl uenced by the eugenist and hygienist currents and by the need to amplify the sphere of state regulation, especially as from the Second Kingdom, the treatment given children and adolescents was guided by state logic. The paradigm adopted had a moralist and authoritarian bent and was incapable of correcting the social injustices of the day. With the redemocratizing of the Brazilian State in the eighties, despite the large infl ux of a theoretical and practical nature brought by the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA) and by the creation of the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS – Single Health Care System), the paradigm previously adopted continues to infl uence, a lot, the practices of assistance and the imagination connected to the child and adolescent up to the present.