A presunção como domínio: vulnerabilidade e seletividade penal entre os Wapichana e Macuxi

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the actions of criminalizing agencies in the municipality of Cantá and their relationship with the indigenous communities of Canauanim, Malacacheta, and Tabalascada, located in the ethnoregion of Serra da Lua, in the state of Roraima, Brazil. By articulating Criminal Law, Anthropology, and Critical Criminology, the study examines how the concept of vulnerability has been mobilized as a symbolic device of repression in pluriethnic contexts, shifting the legal debate from protection to punishment. The main objective is to understand how secondary criminalization targets local cultural practices, especially those related to indigenous age-based sexuality, revealing tensions between traditional normative systems and the formal legal order. The research adopts an ethnographic methodology, including field observations, interviews with indigenous leaders and child protection counselors, institutional document analysis, and critical review of case law from the Court of Justice of Roraima. The data reveal that the Tutelary Council plays a central role in mediating between community values and the State’s repressive apparatus, reproducing selective logics that render cultural diversity invisible and reinforce moralizing stereotypes. The thesis argues that vulnerability, as a presumed legal category, functions as a fixed identity marker, legitimizing penal intervention even in the absence of violence or dissent. Moreover, the standardization of childhood through abstract notions such as “isonomic childhood” and “integral protection” operates, in practice, as a tool of social homogenization and symbolic exclusion of traditional forms of socialization. In conclusion, the criminalization of indigenous age-based sexuality emerges as an expression of a punitive policy of domesticating difference, disguised as protection. Overcoming this logic requires abandoning dogmatic neutrality and recognizing normative plurality as a legitimate boundary to the universalization of Criminal Law in culturally diverse societies.