The Statute on the Child and the Adolescent guarantees all children and adolescents the right to live within family and community contexts. Nevertheless, when it comes to children and adolescents with disabilities it is clear that access to their rights is not assured due to several specificities resulting from the special care they need. This occurs in spite of the various legal documents that stress the importance of the family context for the full development and protection of children and adolescents. However, children with disabilities require of the family greater attention and health care generating a burden in most cases, to family members. When in addition there is poverty, the burden is heavier and often families feel pressed to seek for alternative care in institutions as a possible best way for the care of their children. The historical process of placing children and adolescents with disabilities in institutions presents two main characteristics: the assistance aimed at children at risk, perceived as socially vulnerable and the establishment of a movement led by psychiatry focusing on the abnormal child. The so called culture of institutionalization of children and adolescents long persisted in our country. With the approval of the Statute on the Child and the Adolescent in 1990s a strong movement against the placement of children in institutions takes place. This movement was then strengthened by several policies approved in the subsequent years. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the reasons that still lead to the placement of children and adolescents with disabilities in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, even two decades after the enactment of the Statute. It also focus on the advances that followed the new legal framework aimed at this segment of the population. The analysis is based on two sources of information: a revisit of the data collected by the study From institutionalization to a family setting: changing the practice of institutionalizing children and adolescents with disabilities in the State of Rio de Janeiro (coordinated by the International Center for Research and Policy on Childhood, CIESPI, in partnership with PUC-Rio and sponsored by CNPq/ Ministry of Health, 2006-2008) and new data collected through visits and interviews with directors and representatives of the institutions for children with disabilities in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro (2010-2011).