Abstract
This article provides an ethnography of how a technical team in a centre for socio-educative measures in an open environment focuses on the family when framing the assistance of adolescents who have committed crimes. Analysing two sets of ethnographic data, I describe how families are called upon to speak of themselves and, concomitantly, how they are inserted in a series of documents elaborated by the team. Without this dual presence of the family in the centres - in meetings organized by experts and in the documents that they produce - adolescents could not be properly assisted. I thus describe an enunciative displacement with a concrete scope: adequate management of the presence of the families directly affects the outcome of the socio-educational measures.
Key words:
Socio-educational Measures; Probation period; Assistance; Family; Documents