The management of the minority under the Social Service of Assistance and Protection for Minors of São Paulo (1930-1940): a crossroads of knowledge

Abstract

This article presents some results of a study carried out from the medical records of minors inserted in the Social Service of Assistance and Protection for Minors of São Paulo between 1930 and 1940. This Service was responsible for the management of both abandoned children and adolescents and those considered offenders. The custody tasks provided the intervention of many professionals, such as physicians, psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists, who triggered different kinds of knowledge. The main objective of the research was to investigate how the institutional documentation categorized the minors from a perspective marked by the concepts of legal ideology, criminology, and mental hygiene present in the first decades of the 20th century in Brazil. From the analysis of this documentation, it was possible to identify the knowledge (legal, medical, psychiatric, criminological), its presence and composition acting in the government of minors, besides the ground that such knowledge provided for state interventions concerning minors and also their relatives or guardians.