The proposal was approved by the Spanish Council of Ministers and at a press conference in Madrid, the minister responsible for Justice, Félix Bolaños, presented various data to justify the need for measures to protect minors in digital environments.

According to Bolaños, the average age for having a mobile phone in Spain is 11, 99% of minors who own one are on social networks and 91% access the Internet on a daily basis.

The average age of first access to pornographic content on the Internet is also 11 years old, and in most cases it occurs casually, when children and teenagers are surfing the Internet and social networks, revealed the minister, who said he was quoting data from national and European studies.

The bill that the Council of Ministers approved is the result of around a year's work involving various ministries, organisations and companies and was announced in January 2024 by the government.

At the time, the government said it was preparing legislation to respond to the ‘social problem’ of underage consumption of pornography on the Internet, which would include a pioneering system for verifying identity and age when accessing content, which has since been developed and is currently being tested by the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD).

According to the Spanish government, this is a ‘pioneering application in Europe’ and a system ‘already approved by the main browsers’, in a reference to digital platforms.

Access to pornography at these ages has ‘negative consequences and impacts on minors’, such as a ‘distortion of the perception of sexuality’, emotional and psychological problems, the development of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ or ‘the normalisation of violence against women’, said the Minister for Education, Pilar Legria, on 16 January 2024.

Throughout 2023, the Spanish Public Prosecutor's Office had repeatedly drawn attention to the increase in crimes committed by minors, especially sexual offences, which it linked to the consumption of pornography on the Internet, which young people turn to as if it were a tutorial, in a trivialisation of sexual relations.

Sexual offences committed by minors in Spain increased by 18% in 2022 and teenagers were the perpetrators of 10% of all rapes reported to the authorities, according to an official report.

In addition to new age verification measures for accessing content on the Internet, the proposal approved today by the Spanish government includes mandatory parental control systems for mobile phones and other devices introduced by companies in the manufacture of the devices themselves, training programmes for teachers and students and changes to the Penal Code, among other aspects.

Among these changes to the Penal Code is the criminalisation of the crime of ‘deepfake’, the use of Artificial Intelligence to denigrate and attack the image of any person, whether a minor or an adult.

Specifically, the proposal is to criminalise as an offence against moral integrity the generation and dissemination of images with sexual or seriously vexatious content against any person.

At issue is content created with the aim of appearing to be real using a person's image.

The proposal also provides for ‘digital removal orders’ for aggressors in relation to victims or for it to become an offence to make pornographic content available without control measures to prevent minors from accessing it.

Another aspect of the proposal is the aim to increase penalties for cases such as adults posing as minors in order to communicate with children and teenagers on the Internet.