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Around 1930 in Buenos Aires, physicians and lawyers began asking why children were committing crimes as part of a penal agenda revealed in publications such as the Revista de Psiquiatría, Criminología y Medicina Legal and the Anales de la Sociedad Argentina de Criminología from 1930 to 1946. Emerging from this discourse, conceived as a social practice, was an approach to the dangerous nature of childhood, linked to biological qualities, environmental factors and issues related to family and gender which were flagged as a precursor to crime. Advances in endocrinology, criminal biotypology, and psychiatry were resumed, with these subjects also addressed at the First International Congress on Criminology in Rome and the First Latin American Congress on Criminology in Buenos Aires, both held in 1938. A qualitative analysis of the discourse reveals a blend of the incidence of the biological and the social in the dangerous nature of childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]