As instituições e as leis para a infância no Brasil Império: circulação de ideias sobre o menorismo

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article1 conducts a documentary research on laws, norms, decrees and regulations that constitute primary sources, chronologically dated in the 19th century, in order to answer the following problem: at what moment did the term minor started to characterize a labeling for boys and girls who lived in Empire Brazil and to constitute a basis for the tutelary practices that gained emphasis in the 20th century? The study aims to demonstrate that the 1927 Juvenile Code was enacted as a result of the minorism and part of a transnational movement that was born in the United States of America and circulated in Europe and Latin America. Differently from what was assumed, the research for the elaboration of the text concluded that the term minor - in the sense of minorism - was already used in Brazil, sparsely, in regulations from 1850 on, that is, almost 80 years before what the sources and the researches conducted pointed out, being the Minors Code the effect of minorism and not its creator.