2023-07-06 18:45:31
In Spain, the recent increase in sexual violence committed by minors worries authorities and associations, who denounce the impact of increasingly young people’s access to pornography.
“For a few years”on “witnesses a gradual increase”if not ” spectacular “of “number of sexual crimes committed by minors”underlines, in an interview with AFP, Eduardo Esteban, prosecutor responsible for coordinating criminal policy towards minors in the country.
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This increase, “slightly more pronounced last year” than in previous years, according to the magistrate, ended up placing this problem in the spotlight due to several cases relayed in recent months.
Girls aged 11 and 13 raped by other minors
Among them, the alleged rape at the end of 2022 by a group of minors of an 11-year-old girl in the toilets of a shopping center in the Barcelona region. Among the defendants, only two were over 14, the minimum age to be charged in Spain, and only one was temporarily admitted to a center for minors.
In June, a similar case was reported in the same region, Catalonia, where the number of minors under the age of 14 involved in sexual offenses or crimes doubled between 2015 and 2022, from 53 to 103, and where 12 .3% of those arrested between January and April 2023 in such cases were minors, according to the regional executive and the police.
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Another sign of the authorities’ concern, the Defender of the People, the Spanish equivalent of the Defender of Rights in France, opened an investigation in early June into the alleged sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl by two students from her Madrid college.
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‘Send everyone to jail’
These cases have sparked outrage in the country, where the fight against sexual violence is a national cause. In the middle of the electoral campaign for the legislative elections of July 23, the far right was quick to demand a lowering of the age of criminal responsibility.
But according to experts like Carmela del Moral, of the NGO Save the Children, “there is no quick fix, like lowering the age of criminal responsibility and sending everyone to jail”to stem this increase.
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The uncontrolled access of more and more children to pornography is, according to specialists, one of the main factors in the passage to the act. “Young people, children, are turning to this content earlier and earlier”which they use as “tutorials”, “like when you go on YouTube to see how to fix a flat bicycle tire”explains the prosecutor Esteban.
Nearly 20% of 9-year-olds have watched porn
According to Lluís Ballester, professor at the University of the Balearic Islands, the age of first contact with this content is gradually decreasing: currently, 15 to 20% of Spanish children aged 8 to 9 claim to have already been confronted with pornography online. .
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A 2020 study by Save The Children showed that almost seven out of ten teenagers frequently consumed pornography and that more than half of them were inspired by it in their sexual experiences.
However, this pornography is often “violent, with submissive women, who never contradict or oppose male desire, who accept any practice, even if it’s crazy”insists Lluís Ballester.
And it normalizes group attacks, often filmed, warns Carmela Del Moral.
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Ineffective control
If access to pornographic content is in theory prohibited for those under 18, control is generally lacking, leading prosecutor Esteban to call for a ” parental control […] with the cooperation of social networks » and platforms.
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This access without real control is a concern in many countries, such as in France, where the government announced in May that it wanted to achieve effective age verification on porn sites before the end of the year.
Faced with this impact of porn, experts also agree on the need to strengthen the sex education of adolescents. “The measures adopted with minors have their effect and there are very few recurrences”, insists the prosecutor Esteban. But “with more adequate sex education, there would be far fewer crimes”.
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