Criminal protection for families: a current challenge for the law (IV and final).

In the current legal context, it is considered that the family and the relationships that originate in it, such as harmony, respect, unity and solidarity, which give it meaning, foundation, identity and stability, are important assets that deserve and should receive special protection by the States, protection that should be comprehensive and not necessarily criminal.

It is also accepted in this space that, since there are multiple conducts that negatively affect the family institution, criminal intervention should be limited to the protection of those assets and only against conducts that seriously damage them, that are intolerable within it, due to the way in which they affect its existence and the coexistence among its members.

Although criminal protection is the most drastic, it turns out to be the most ineffective to prevent and control conducts that affect the family or other legal assets because, when it acts, these have already been violated. Therefore, it is important to define the main risk factors of a social nature, which will influence the existence of violence in the family and by the family, and consequently in minors.

Criminal Law begins to play its fundamental role when certain behaviors, due to their implication and the danger they represent in the family framework, are extended in the scope of application, which begins to have a protection from the criminal sphere due to the importance for society of the juridical good that is affected or endangered.

In this way, an interrelation between these two matters begins, due to the connection established by the protection in Criminal Law of legal assets that by their very nature are included in Family Law; this legal asset does not disappear, but it does undergo changes depending on the scope of protection.

The fundamental task of enormous economic, political and social transcendence for any society is to fight and defeat crime, at least to reduce it to its minimum expression, which does not mean the chimerical dream that crime will totally disappear. There will always be criminal behavior, but it is a matter of reducing it to the minimum. That is what we fight for. That is why the law exists.

In issues such as family violence or domestic violence, which involve victimization, dehumanization of family members, it is necessary that when the physical, psychological, emotional integrity of the members of the family is endangered by the assumption by individuals of that family of criminal behaviors, the substantive penal norms of family court and the instrument that constitutes the penal process for the materialization of those norms of penological protection of the family are present as guarantors of that integrity.

Written by Osvaldo Manuel Álvarez Torres-Consulting Professor University of Matanzas.