A draft bill for Spain’s new ‘Protection of Minors Law’ has been released and it’s a wide-reaching, ambitious piece of legislation that seeks to protect children in the online world.

Bringing together aspects of health, education and legal policy, the aim of the law is to protect children and teenagers online, “especially the rights to privacy, honour and self-image, secrecy of communications and the protection of personal data and access to age-appropriate content.”

The bill, which is at the draft stage but has been seen by Spanish daily El País, also attempts to address the psychological and emotional damage caused by technology overuse in childhood and adolescence, which experts say include access to pornographic or violent content; disinformation and fake news; dangerous or socially inappropriate behaviour; and damage to physical and mental health, including screen addiction.

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Among the raft of new measures, which will involve health and education policy, as well as legal reform, are online restraining orders, parental safety locks, and treatments for phone and technology addictions.

In Spain children get their first phone at age 11 on average. In terms of usage, 94.8 percent of teenagers in Spain have a mobile phone with internet and 90.8 percent go online every day or almost every day. Half of adolescents use the internet more than five hours a day on weekends, and 98.5 percent of teenagers are registered on a social media platform

Clearly, childhoods in the 2020s are very different to how they were even a decade or two ago. The Protection of Minors Law is an attempt by the government to protect children in the increasingly online world.

It should be noted that the law is still at the draft stage and a lot of detail still needs to be ironed out. A formal presentation of the policy proposal is expected in late-June.

Age verification

One of the central pillars of the bill is tightening up age verification protocols. The draft states that the Ministry for Digital Transformation will develop “technical guidelines to facilitate the development of tools” by internet providers, though no other aspects are specified at this stage.

Age verification systems currently used by social media platforms are notoriously lax and in many cases based on forms that the user (ie. the child themselves) fills in when registering, in which they only have to tick a box in which they state that they are over a certain age (on TikTok, for example, the minimum age to register is 13) without any way of actually requiring age verification.

Parental locks

Perhaps the headline measure is that the government will try to force mobile phones and other electronic devices to have free, simple and accessible parental controls.

All mobiles, tablets, computers and televisions will have to include the digital parental control function as standard so that it can be activated in a clear way – similar to language selection – by parents or guardians, who will be able to decide which applications, services and content they restrict for minors.

READ ALSO: Growing calls for Spain to ban mobiles for under-16s

Virtual restraining orders

The introduction of virtual restraining orders (or a ‘distance penalty’ as it’s referred to in the draft text) is another new introduction. It’s also one that would require significant legal reform, for which up to 10 articles of the Spanish Penal Code would have to be modified “to incorporate the penalty of prohibition of access or communication through social networks, forums, communication platforms or any other place in the virtual space, when the crime is committed within them.”

In other words, bans on using certain platforms for bad behaviour.

Legal crackdown on false identities

Similarly, the government also aims to include using false identities or profiles in several articles of the penal code, so that when someone uses a fake identity in order to “facilitate the execution of criminal conduct”, or makes a profile with a fake age, sex, gender or other personal characteristics, criminal penalties could in theory be issued.

This is a measure presumably intended to intended to protect children from predators online, but also to prevent online bullying among children.

Health-focused approach

The law is not just a legal text, however. It will also try to introduce a more holistic, health-based approach that will monitor Spanish minors’ technology use throughout their childhoods.

Though the exact details are still to be ironed out (mostly because health powers are devolved in Spain) the text does mention a ‘review’ programme which includes sessions from birth up to age 14 in which nurses, paediatricians and psychologists will participate.

These sessions will be used to identify “problematic uses” of technology, such as phone addiction, and will test for “other harmful behaviours such as isolation, lack of play or lack of language stimulation” among others.

Striking a healthy balance between online and offline play is also a key objective of the law. According to the draft: “Special attention will be paid to identifying situations in which children and adolescents resort to the digital environment as a priority to establish peer relationships, checking whether they have at their disposal healthy leisure resources, meeting places and free recreational activities.”

Addiction treatment

Regional governments will create specific health care procedures for children displaying addictive behaviour towards digital devices, pooling the resources of local mental health care services, addictive behaviour care units and child and adolescent mental health centres.

Some may even create dedicated centres for children suffering device addiction, which will include special consideration for non-substance addictive behaviour. These types of centres already exist in some parts of Spain, notably in Madrid, which was a pioneer in launching a similar service in 2018.

Digital literacy plan

Education will also play a role, and the government hopes to implement a ‘digital literacy plan’ through different subjects, similarly to how sex education can be taught across several different classes.

The aim is to better equip youngsters for the online world and give them the tools to combat, for example, fake news, and teach them how to think critically online.