Vor Gewalt gerettet, Gewalt ausgesetzt: Kinderschutz und Zwangseinweisungen in psychiatrische Einrichtungen in der Schweiz (1945-1981)«. This study examines the forced psychiatric institutionalization of minors at the Cantonal Neuropsychiatric Hospital (CNH) in Mendrisio, Ticino, Switzerland, between 1945 and 1981, revealing intrinsic contradictions in the developing child protection systems. Analyzing clinical files and reports, it demonstrates how hundreds of disadvantaged or “morally abandoned” minors faced compulsory social measures in an unsuitable setting that lacked pedi-atric wards and specialists and was legitimized by ambiguous laws, stigmatization, psychiatric knowledge, and no institutional alternatives. Juvenile deviance was medicalized and, despite the frequent absence of rigorous psychiatric diagnoses, subjected to violent interventions ranging from shock therapies and neuroleptics to lobotomies and sterilizations. Such violence was not isolated but systemic, expressing a model of social protection founded on disciplinary control, forced normalization, and eugenic views of difference. Driven by critical movements, international reforms, and political pressure, the social and institutional changes of the 1970s did not eliminate coercive logics but reconfigured them, thus illustrating the state of “permanent liminality” in which all actors involved remained trapped between con-flicting rationales of care and coercion.