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Contrary to an image of harmonious integration, poor Brazilian adolescents, originating from native populations or the descendants of slaves deported from Africa, suffer from social violence that is too often extreme. Murder and suicide are the tragic destiny of tens of thousands of these adolescents each year. This article aims to characterise this social violence and to analyse the driving forces behind it. It shows that there is a very close interweaving between social stratification and discrimination that produces a disqualification of the symbolic Law and social laws. This interweaving is played out ferociously in institutions whose task is to welcome, protect and accompany these adolescents in such a way that they reproduce a denial of the symbolic Law and flout social laws by enacting major transgressions of fundamental taboos. The prevalence of the law of the survival of the fittest − which is merely a law in name − advocated by professionals as well as adolescents, configures the whole institutional set-up under the primacy of the phallic, and therefore of a position of hardness and legitimation of violence, associated with a takeover of power by tyrannical figures and authorities.