Institutional violence and sexual panic directed at poor young women and trans persons in Buenos Aires

Institutional violence directed against young people in Argentina has involved a specific dimension of sexual and gendered violence. This article analyses some of the ideological effects and practices implicated in the current construction of 'sexual panic' surrounding young women and 'trans' persons as a form of sexual and gendered violence by specific public institutions involved in the assistance of adolescents experiencing homelessness, poverty, and prostitution in the City of Buenos Aires.

It provides historical frameworks of experiences and struggles of gender and sexual social movements in Argentina from the point of view of gender and sexual rights in developing countries. All data and arguments submitted throughout the text are based on extensive ethnographic research concerning gender and sexual violence, class, and discrimination in the context of increasing poverty and social exclusion in Argentina and Latin America. The author provides reflections at the end of the paper including that these forms of violence are part of a group of regulatory strategies inscribed in the larger field of the politics of normalizing desire, bodies, and gender and sexual identities, located in numerous institutions and hegemonic discourse. This reveals the cross-cutting repressive character of the state, for each time it delineates an imprecise regulatory field for the concrete practices of its institutions, it confirms the 'problematic' or 'unclassifiable' conditions of certain groups. The two following areas are examined:

• gender, age, and poverty: sexual panic and violence directed towards girls
• young people at the 'border,' sexuality at the crossroads