The Minister for Health, Social Security and Equality, Ana Mato, has announced a series of changes to the law which the government feel are necessary in the interest of protecting children.
Children of couples who have been involved in domestic violence case will also now be classified as “victims”, amending a law passed in 2004, in which acts of violence are considered “as a manifestation of discrimination, the inequality and power relations of men over women, exerted on these by those who are or have been their spouses or those who are or have been linked to them by similar affective relationships, even without cohabitation”.
The standard approach following a case of violence being recorded would now automatically be for the children to remain with the mother, without clarifying visitation rights of the father.
Principally, these matters will be discussed and negotiated through a working group that will assess the implications in changes of 125 measures across 11 laws, including adapting the Unified Register of Child Abuse and the Child and Sexual Exploitation Register.
As part of the motion, the legal age of marriage with consent will be increased to 16 from the current age of 14, although the standard age will remain at 18.
The age of sexual consent will also increase and will be in line with that of neighbouring countries, in order to “avoid abuse and fight more effectively against paedophilia” and there will be a clearer defined procedure for dealing with sexual abuse cases within the family, with victims being given priority in foster care as part of the process, with children under three years of age no longer being dealt with at an institution, but through integration into a family as an emergency case.
There are currently 35,000 children who are in care across Spain, with an ever increasing number of families looking to adopt and being forced to look to other countries to do so. By easing the process of adoption it is hoped that more children could be placed directly with permanent adoptive parents at an earlier age, albeit at the discretion of a judge.
Young people will also be reclassified and helped with more modern issues that plague them, with “cyberbullying” now being recognised under the Criminal Code, along with eating disorders being given more consideration, and paediatric care will now be extended to cover young people up to the age of 18, rather than the current age of 14, and access to alcohol will also become more restrictive with a unified age of 18 hoping to deal with problems related to abuse.
Filed under: http://www.theleader.info/article/38462/
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