Vox’s proposal to lower the criminal age of minors from 14 to 12 years and to toughen the conditions of confinement and discipline in boarding centers has not managed to move forward, receiving 178 votes against compared to 33 in favor and the abstention of the PP. This Tuesday, the Plenary Session of Congress heard strong words such as “vomitive”, “disgusting”, “hate” and “racism”, given that the reform to the law on criminal responsibility for minors proposed by the extreme right proposes the immediate expulsion from Spain of those children of foreign origin who commit a crime, after withdrawing their nationality if they had it, and regardless of the fact that this expulsion takes them away from their parents with no possibility of return for up to six years, even more than what is proposed for adults who commit crimes.
Turning to one of its favorite policies, migration, Vox is now calling for “drastic decisions” to solve the “social problem” that in its opinion Spain is going through: “The moral and social deterioration that society is suffering is evident, with devastating consequences for the security of Spaniards,” the party assures in the statement of reasons that deputy Blanca Armario has read in Congress. And they attribute it to “illegal, massive and uncontrolled immigration,” as well as the “sought hypersexualization of minors in the educational field” by the left. The PP, through Fernando de Rosa Torner, has had to remember that minors who commit crimes also belong to wealthy families, but in his strategy of swimming without getting his clothes wet, the popular deputy has accepted the low crime figures raised by Vox and harshly criticized the Government’s policies to, finally, suggest: “Wouldn’t you like us to listen to the experts before proposing this reform?” And abstain.
The representative of Esquerra Republicana, Pilar Valluguera, has given the example of a boy who shot himself in the foot with a weapon “that he could not have had at 13 years old”, in reference to Felipe Juan Froilán, nephew of the King, an event that occurred in 2012. Not all boys who play with guns belong to “disstructured” families or are committed by “foreign minors”, as Vox points out. On many occasions it is just the opposite, they are the victims of trafficking for sexual or labor exploitation, as the police well know, who in recent days announced the dismantling of one of these networks.
But the charge towards these has been so noticeable in Vox’s argument that several of the parliamentarians have accused the “hatred” and “racism” that hides a reform that they did not want to support. All the intervening parties have reproached the extreme right for its recurring and “sick” political discourse against migrant children, in the words of Àgueda Micó, from the Mixto group, in the same way that they have all appealed to education and prevention as axes of reducing crime at these ages. This is what they have done in the interventions of the Basque group, Podemos, Sumar and the socialists. Raúl Díaz Marín has given voice to the latter: “You use hatred and heavy-handedness, cruelty and institutionalized racism, and we are not going to tolerate that. You treat minors as things,” said the deputy, who concluded with the phrase: “How easy it is to be a fascist in a free country, but how difficult it is to be free in a fascist country.”
Minutes earlier, the Vox representative had pointed out that “Spain has become an amusement park for criminals” and that “criminality suits” the left-wing parties, because “they feel comfortable among criminals.” The deputy has not hesitated to accuse the left-wing parties of “having perverted” children and has warned that “the party will not be paid for those who come to murder, rape girls and women, pimp the security forces and trample on the lives of Spaniards.” To those, he says “get out”, he has pronounced it with many exclamation points. Vox asks that “the entire sanctioning judicial apparatus of the State” fall on them. Deputy Micó recalled that Spain has one of the lowest rates of youth crime in all of Europe.
The ultra party proposes lowering the criminal age and statistics show that the older the boys are, the more the crime rate increases, with 17 years of age being the highest, with 7.1 minors convicted per 1,000 inhabitants in 2024, according to the INE. The majority of those convicted are of Spanish nationality (80%), however, the rate per 1,000 inhabitants of boys aged 14 to 17 is against foreigners, almost twice as many sentences as those of Spaniards. Injuries and robberies are, in any case, the most repeated crimes and infractions are concentrated in Melilla and Ceuta with around 62% of the cases, the Canary Islands, Extremadura and Aragón (which are close to 19%). The Community of Madrid is the one with the lowest rate, with 6.6.
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