LETTER FROM MADRID
It's an unwritten but extremely widespread rule: Spanish children must have a smartphone by the time they start their first year of secondary education between the ages of 11 and 12. Until now, this social norm has generally been accepted with indifference or insouciance, and sometimes with a certain fatalism, depending on the parents. However, since the start of the current school year, a series of incidents linked to children's use of social media and the mobilization of parent groups against early and often unlimited access to cell phones has turned the issue into a major national debate. It is an unprecedented development in a country that, until now, has been mostly unaffected by the debates elsewhere in Europe on the risks of screentime for children.
In early September, parents of the small town of Almendralejo, Extremadura (central Spain), discovered that fake nude photos of their daughters made using artificial intelligence software were circulating on social media. Over 20 victims were identified, their ages ranging from 12 to 14. Twenty-six boys are now under police investigation. Five, aged under 14, are not criminally responsible. The others face sentences ranging from two to nine years in prison for creating pornographic content involving minors. Some of the photos were allegedly posted on adult websites.
In late September, the village of Astillero in Cantabria (northern Spain) was horrified to discover that dozens of 14 year olds had been added to a WhatsApp group containing pornographic and extreme content, including images of sexual assaults on minors, zoophilia and beheading videos. Lastly, in November, the management of a school in Saint-Sébastien, Basque Country, decided to alert parents to the existence of a group circulating pornographic, racist, homophobic and Francoist content. The group had almost a thousand members, most of them aged between 13 and 15.
Every other kid has one
It wasn't these incidents that sparked the movement against the widespread use of cell phones by 12 year olds in Barcelona's Poblenou district last September. But in all likelihood, without these cases, the appeal of parents worried about the negative impact of overexposure to screens or inappropriate digital content would not have gained the momentum it now has. The Telegram group they created (Mobile Free Adolescence) has over 10,000 members and local versions have sprung up in almost every region of Spain.
Initially, Elizabeth Garcia, a mother of three, shared articles with other parents about the risks the internet posed for children and was concerned about her eldest daughter's transition to high school. But when she interviewed parents to find out why they had bought their teenager a cell phone, she noted two main reasons. The first was the ease of reaching and locating them at all times. The second was that (almost) all the other kids had one.
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