Uruguayan Public Safety Policies in Experts’ Discourse

The paper analyzes the conceptual use of the ideas of social risk and vulnerability, commonly used in childhood’s field of study in Uruguay. The research is focused on the area of juvenile justice and its empirical work is based on discourse analysis. The research focus the attention on experts’ discourse (lawyers’, social workers’, psychologists’, psychiatrics’ and social educators’) attached to judicial expedients in Adolescents’ Court in Montevideo, Uruguay. The investigation studies the use of both concepts in the social judicial and penal reports that suggests different institutional answers to the same situation.