“He was punished corporeally, and it was possible to hear the screams”: micro-history of a criminal case (São José School, 1911)

Abstract

This article presents a criminal case involving minors in a private school institution in the city of Lajeado, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in the year 1911. By bringing to light a criminal complaint from the beginning of the 20th century, we seek to understand possible legal representations about children who are victims of abuse and violence - symbolic and physical. To this end, it operates with the Foucauldian concepts of event, violence and punishment, as well as with the micro-history of violence, subsidized by methodological horizons arising respectively from the studies of Carlo Ginzburg and Boris Fausto, with the intention of identifying, in a case of child aggression, the way education was structured and directed in a private institution with a confessional nature and its consequences in the legal area.

Keywords:
History of Education; violence; punishment; infancy