The Political Dimension of Adolescents’ Penal Responsibility in Latin America: notes for building a modest utopia.

Abstract

This article deals with the paradigm change in the juvenile justice introduced by the International Convention on Children’s Rights of 1989 – which was institutionalized in Brazil by the Children and Adolescent Statute of 1990 – that influenced all the legislation on childhood in Latin America. The article shows that the new legislation overcomes the tutelary view and affirms a guarantying view, characterized, in the field of the relationship between minors and the state or adults, by a progressive autonomy model and, in the field of social control, by an adolescent responsibility model. Finally, the article criticizes the sensationalism by which the juvenile issues are dealt with in Latin America and absence of a relationship of these issues to politics and democracy, as well as the precarious state of judicial studies about this theme.