Niños asesinos de niños: el caso del Petiso Orejudo (Argentina, comienzos del siglo XX)

• Main Author: María Carolina Zapiola
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherches sur les Mondes Américains 2006-09-01
• Series: Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos
• Subjects: Argentina
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/2827

In this paper we make a preliminary analysis of the existent relationships between the scientific and the legal representations of infantile and juvenile delinquency and those who embodied in the argentinian press in the decade of 1910, trough the study of  some speeches about the crimes of the serial killer Cayetano Santos Godino, well known as “el Petiso Orejudo”. We want to demonstrate that in this period several images of infantile delinquency and of violence exerced by children or against children have coexisted in a conflicting way, and we attempt to establish that the positivist criminological speech wasn’t at the moment the only voice authorized to treat these issues.