Abstract:
The creation of Brazil’s Children Bureau (Departamento Nacional da Criança) in 1940, as part of the construction of a welfare system initiated by the Vargas regime, can be considered a milestone in the history of child care policies in the country. We address the early stages of development of the federal government’s child protection services in order to examine the ways trough which child experts sought to define a sphere of professional action for themselves within the State. To deal with such problems as infant mortality and juvenile delinquency, they defended the implementation of a set of health, education, and social assistance policies. We argue that these experts were largely informed by interpretations of Brazil that pointed to the poverty and malnutrition of its population as the main challenge to the nation-building process, and resorted to the language of eugenics in order to stress the social dimension of child welfare’s main issues in the country, such as infant mortality and juvenile delinquency.
Keywords:
child welfare history; eugenics; Brazil’s Children Bureau (Departamento Nacional da Criança)