Peer-reviewed article
Straight from foster care to the youth detention center? The (mis)paths of child protection and juvenile justice policies in the construction of violent masculinities.
Mascarenhas M ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examines how child protection policies and juvenile justice systems in Portugal interact to shape the development of young people in detention centers. The research traces the life paths of detained youth who have often experienced both protective institutionalization and violence, exploring how gender socialization contributes to rigid masculinities and violence as a coping strategy. The study highlights disconnects between the child protection and juvenile justice systems and their differential effects on boys and girls in vulnerable situations.
Key points
- Young people in Portuguese Youth Detention Centers have typically been displaced from families and communities after early exposure to or witness of violence
- There is a relationship between protective institutionalization in childhood and later pre-delinquent pathways
- Gender socialization, particularly of boys, influences how youth adopt violence as an adaptive strategy
- Child protection and juvenile justice systems operate with some separation in Portugal, but this separation has not prevented negative outcomes for at-risk youth
- The study uses narratives from the X-MEN Project to trace connections between gender, institutional experiences, and detention
Limitations
The document is a study overview and does not provide detailed quantitative findings, outcome measurements, or comparisons between groups, making it difficult to assess the strength of evidence or the effectiveness of specific interventions. The study focuses on narrative data from detained youth, which may not be generalizable to all at-risk children or other national contexts.
Abstract
The present article aims to understand how public policies for the protection of endangered children/youngsters and juvenile justice work together or, on the contrary, in a disjointed way, and its impacts on the reproduction of gender stereotypes, namely in the construction of rigid masculinities of youngsters in detention and the adoption of violence as an adaptive strategy. Youth Detention Centers (YDC) were chosen as a backdrop since young people at risk are a particular fringe of society who, similar to other vulnerable groups (e.g., migrants, refugees, etc.), face more significant risks of GBV, since they are displaced from their families and communities when they are admitted at Portuguese YDCs and their paths have invariably been marked by having witnessed or been exposed to violence, and often, as we shall see, to protective institutionalization at an early stage in their journey. To this end, the role of YDC's will be traced within the framework of public policies on juvenile justice in Portugal, exploring the evolution of public policies aimed at both the risk and the social danger of children and young people, namely the effects of the separation that has taken place in Portugal of these two domains in the face of the effects of the promiscuity between the domain of danger and that of social risk. Results of the X-MEN Project, namely the youngsters' narratives on their life trajectories until entering the YDC, will be used to illustrate the relationship between gender socialization (particularly of boys), the interpenetration between protective institutionalization and its predictor of a pre-delinquent path and, finally, how gender can be the basis for differentiated treatment by the systems that work with young people in danger (Child Protection System) and at risk (Juvenile Justice System).