10 has joined many members to drug traffickers, for protection. Gangs are classified as a violent response to a state violence to which their members have been submitted through both exclusion and abandonment. The main measures adopted by the State to confront the problem of young delinquency stereotyped in gangs or maras have been an increase in administrative apprehensions as of the nineties, which has generated the segregation of children and youngsters in street situations and “under suspicion” of belonging to a mara, and the State’s policy of “zero tolerance”, among others. According to data of 2003, in Honduras 50.4% of the population was under the age of 18. 66% of boys and girls between the ages of 0 and 14 years old are under the line of poverty. Despite the important legal instruments the State has, in which it acknowledges the superior interest of children, it has not been able in the practice to improve the general situation of Honduran children and youngsters, since there is a lack of guiding policies and plans in the matter. b) Carlos Tiffer-Sotomayor, attorney The current violence in Central America is the result of a long structural process linked to problems of a social, economic, and political-military nature. In recent years a phenomenon of juvenile violence has expanded, and in the case of Honduras it has reached the level of juvenile gangs. Said gangs frequently find themselves involved in illegal activities such as drug consumption, violent acts with other gangs, and the committing of crimes against property such as robbery and theft, and in some cases a delinquency related with crimes against life, sexual liberty, drug trafficking, or extortive kidnapping. However, it is not true that the child and teenage factor are the determining conditions in a phenomenon of insecurity. Besides, we would have to add the important difference between the real criminal rate and the phenomenon of the perception of citizens regarding crime and the security or insecurity in a society. This difference between perception and reality is generated by some members of the press, who exacerbate the fears of the population, with regard to the violence and insecurity generated by the so-called young gangs. In Honduras the State’s response is focused on repression, not only institutional but even private, that seeks to eliminate violence with more violence, thus creating a completely erroneous public policy. True public safety is achieved with a solid social security. Violence has a social structure with a spiral form, that is, if when faced with a violent reaction, the response is more violence, it is sure and probable that there will be more violence. When this repression is focused toward children and teenagers, the problem and dimension of the violent response are greater, since they include violence as cultural patterns, reason for which they will also be violent adults. Public policies must be oriented toward social, and especially, educational policies. At the same time, the best criminal policy must be a good social policy, especially when dealing with young gangs or maras. The criminal policy oriented only to repression is condemned to fail. The stigmatization suffered by children and teenagers turn them from perpetrators to victims, and produces a phenomenon of exclusion both by the population as well as through auto exclusion. When perceived as those responsible for the lack of public safety, they themselves incorporate this perception and consider themselves excluded from society. Said stigmatization will emphasize stratification and the differences between social classes.