The Spanish authorities record an increase of sexual assaults among minors and argue that the increase in sex crimes is largely due to the increasing access that minors have to pornography.
“For several years now we have seen an impressive increase in the number of sexual crimes committed by minors”emphasizes Eduardo Esteban, prosecutor responsible for the criminal treatment of minors in Spain.
As reported by AFP, this rise, “which was slightly higher last year” compared to previous years, according to the prosecutor, turned the spotlight on the problem after several incidents recorded in recent months.
Among them was the rape in late 2022 by a group of minors of an 11-year-old girl in the toilets of a Barcelona mall. Of the defendants, only two were over 14, the age of criminal responsibility in Spain, and only one was temporarily placed in a juvenile center.
In June, a similar case was also recorded in Catalonia, while at the same time the public defender began an investigation into the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl by two of her classmates at a high school in Madrid.
Number of minors under 14 involved in sexual offenses or crimes in Catalonia doubled from 2005 to 2022going from 53 to 103.
Furthermore, 12.3% of people arrested between January and April 2023 for such cases were minorsaccording to the regional government and police.
These incidents caused outrage in the country, where the fight against gender-based violence is considered a national cause. In the midst of an election campaign for the early parliamentary elections on July 23, the extreme right did not take long to request the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility.
Uncontrolled access
But as experts such as Carmela del Moral of the non-governmental organization Save the Children point out, “there is no magic solution like lowering the age of criminal responsibility and sending everyone to prison.”
Uncontrolled access to pornography from an increasingly younger age is, according to experts, one of the main factors in the increase in sexual crimes committed by minors.
As “educational material…”
“Young people, children are turning at an ever younger age to these contents,” which serve as “educational material”like “when we watch on YouTube how to fix our bicycle tire,” Esteban explains.
As Luis Bagester, a professor at the University of the Balearic Islands points out, the age of first contact with this material is gradually decreasing: currently 15 to 20% of 8- to 9-year-olds in Spain state that they have already seen pornography on the Internet.
Research carried out in 2020 by Save the Children showed that almost seven out of ten teenagers regularly watch pornography and more than half of them take the content they have seen as a model for their sexual experiences.
But pornography is often “violent, with women submitting, never arguing and never denying men’s desires, women who accept any act, no matter how absurd,” Bagester points out.
Pornography also makes gang assaults commonplace, which are often filmed, Del Moral warns.
Young people “learn about sexuality through pornography, and it’s like learning to drive by watching Fast and Furious”emphasizes del Moral..
Although minors are theoretically prohibited from accessing pornographic content in Spain, the control is not sufficient, prompting Esteban to call for “parental control with the cooperation of social media” and platforms.
At the same time, the experts also agree on the need to strengthen the sexual education of teenagers, with Esteban estimating that “with more adequate sexual education, far fewer crimes would be recorded”.
Source: News Beast
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