Criminal protection for families: a current challenge for the law.

Family Criminal Law comprises a set of institutions, norms and legal provisions that essentially protect families when punishable illegal activities are carried out by their members, or when the members of the family themselves attack the members of that family and therefore alter the family ties, as they put at risk or damage the basic social cell which par excellence is the family, associated as it is to the civil society of each country and to an international civil society in a globalized world such as the one that exists today.

The family is the basis, the primordial cell of each society, so given its privileged position it must observe principles that regulate the conduct and personality of the human beings that arise from it and develop as family actors, political and civil actors, elements that are given because in its bosom are contained moral values and social treatment, so that life develops in harmony, to achieve inclusive social welfare for all. It is, in addition, consubstantial to the civil societies of each country, to which civil societies are associated and from which they are nourished.

Substantive criminal law, as it is known, contains prohibitive norms, in which individuals are warned that if they violate them, they will be subject to a pre-established sanction in those same norms. However, if the offender or transgressor of the rule is a member of the family or is linked to it, the sanction to be imposed ranges from the main criminal sanction to the imposition of accessory sanctions which, in certain circumstances, will imply the loss or suspension of certain rights essential to the family.

Therefore, the Criminal Codes have a range of provisions that refer to the family, consequently, this relationship of Family Law with Criminal Law, involves the formation of a binomial that regulates the conduct of families, with transcendence to the field of punishable law. To the materialization of these branches of law for the sake of criminal protection for families, are added, due to their instrumental nature, the criminal and/or family proceedings.

Written by Doctor Osvaldo Manuel Álvarez Torres.