On childhood, violence, and what a community chooses to consecrate as culture

In municipalities along the Costa del Sol, two languages of cultural policy coexist without apparent conflict. On one hand, major events promoting animal welfare, featuring artists and guests, are presented as initiatives of culture, solidarity, and participation. On the other, an agenda that dignifies bullfighting: talks, salon bullfighting classes, and the promotion of the bullring as a sociocultural space, driven by bullfighting entities and institutional support. One does not need a specific name for the contradiction to be glaringly obvious.

What matters is not the specific case, but the logic of governance. An administration that projects sensitivity towards certain animals while simultaneously consecrating as a heritage worthy of celebration a spectacle whose content is the harm and death of another, maintains two discourses that cancel each other out. It is not necessary to attribute to anyone the intention of covering anything up for the contradiction to operate: it is enough that both coexist. The incoherence does not belong to an individual. It is structural, and it is sustained by something greater than any local council.

In Spain, that contradiction is not merely moral: it holds legal status. Act 7/2023 recognises and protects animal welfare, yet expressly excludes from its scope animals utilised in bullfighting spectacles. And Act 18/2013 secures bullfighting as cultural heritage worthy of protection. The same legal system that protects certain animals removes others from that protection by invoking culture. What in a municipality appears to be a local inconsistency is, in reality, the faithful application of a national exception.

I wish to pause where I believe the important issues are at stake, and where my profession—the management of and reflection upon culture—compels me to look: not at whether bullfighting implies real harm to an animal, which it does, but at what occurs when that harm is aestheticised and presented to a child as a heritage worthy of celebration.

Regarding childhood, one must be precise, without exaggeration. I do not maintain that attending a bullfight produces an inevitable clinical trauma: the available evidence does not allow one to assert this, and I shall not pretend otherwise. What the reviewed literature does allow one to maintain, with caution, is something more sober: childhood exposure to real violence against animals appears associated with processes of normalising cruelty, socio-emotional difficulties, and reduced sensitivity to violence in specific contexts. The evidence is primarily correlational or contextual, not a direct and universal causality; yet that is sufficient to justify caution. In child policy, we never demand proof of grave and irreversible harm to limit a child's exposure to a violent environment: reasonable evidence of a relevant and avoidable risk suffices.

Nor should one simplify the evidence itself. There are specific studies on minors and bullfighting that point in different directions: one, using videos of bullfights, associated certain content with increased aggression expressed in young boys; another, recent, does not confirm a simple negative effect and even qualifies any linear interpretation. I cite both intentionally, because honesty compels one to acknowledge that the matter is not closed. And even acknowledging this, the precautionary principle holds: when the evidence regarding a risk to minors is reasonable though not conclusive, prudence does not wait for certainty.

The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has spoken twice, and it is worth distinguishing what it said on each occasion. In 2018, it recommended that Spain prohibit the participation of minors under eighteen years of age in bullfighting spectacles, both as bullfighters and as spectators. In 2026, it went further: concerned that children continue to be witnesses to violence and death in bullfighting festivities, it requested that eighteen years be set as the minimum age for participating in events, festivities, and bullfighting schools, without exception, and to raise awareness regarding the negative effects of such violence on children, including spectators. This is not an isolated observation: it is a persistent, and growing, concern of the international body tasked with safeguarding the rights of childhood.

Some respond that the child who attends bullfights knows how to distinguish, that the festive framework cushions the experience, that they do not identify with the animal. This may be partly true. Yet there is a difference. We monitor, with good reason, the violence on screens, and we do so even though the child knows it is fiction. The bullfight is not fiction. It is irreversible biological harm—wounds, blood, exhaustion, death—inflicted upon a real animal, in public, celebrated by a collective. And without an entry veto for minors: the Málaga bullring itself celebrates its 'Picassian' bullfight every year, cloaked as a tribute to art, and nothing prevents a minor from entering to watch it. If we take precautions against simulated violence, it is difficult to understand why we lower our guard precisely when it is real and wrapped in a cultural aura.

And this is, for me, the crux. Because the cultural aura is not an ornament: it is the mechanism. Bullfighting shields itself by invoking Picasso, art, and shared heritage. The aestheticisation does not accompany the violence: it transforms it into something else in the eyes of the observer, and most especially in those of a child who is still learning which things in the world deserve admiration. When a community surrounds an act of harm with music, ceremony, beauty, and the seal of heritage, it is not merely permitting it: it is teaching one to contemplate it as worthy. It is educating a gaze.

That is what is rarely discussed. Culture is never neutral. It does not merely reflect what a society is; it produces sensitivity or blunts it, publicly deciding what deserves admiration and what does not. Choosing what we present to childhood as valuable is one of the most profound pedagogical acts a community performs, even if it is almost never named as such. And a community that teaches its children to applaud the suffering of a living being because it is endorsed by tradition is teaching them something about suffering, about living beings, and about what tradition can justify, all at once.

In childhood, the request admits no nuances. I ask for what the United Nations asks and what the most elementary coherence demands: that minors be excluded. That an institution which is photographed with children in support of animals does not take them, nor allow them to be taken under its protection, to witness the ritual death of an animal. That we cease asking the word 'culture' to perform the dirty work of making presentable, before a child, that which in any other context we would forbid them to see.

The question that must be sustained is not whether bullfighting is art. It is simpler and more uncomfortable: what are we teaching a child to look at when we teach them to look at this, and why have we decided that the word heritage is sufficient for the question not to be asked.

On open conversation

This text adheres to childhood because it is where the contradiction is least defensible, and it touches upon something I explore in this notebook: that culture is not neutral, that it decides publicly what is offered for admiration, and that doing so before someone who is still learning to look is a pedagogical act, whether it is named as such or not. If anyone wishes to intervene from the perspectives of children's rights, education, developmental psychology, or cultural management, this notebook remains open.

Sources

Act 7/2023, of 28 March, on the protection of the rights and welfare of animals. BOE-A-2023-7936, art. 1.3.a). https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2023-7936

Act 18/2013, of 12 November, for the regulation of bullfighting as cultural heritage. BOE-A-2013-11837, art. 2. https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2013-11837

Committee on the Rights of the Child (UN). Concluding observations on the combined fifth and sixth periodic reports of Spain. CRC/C/ESP/CO/5-6, 5 March 2018, §25.

Committee on the Rights of the Child (UN). Concluding observations on the seventh periodic report of Spain. CRC/C/ESP/CO/7, 23 February 2026, §23.

Ladny, R. T. and Meyer, L. (2019). “Traumatized Witnesses: Review of Childhood Exposure to Animal Cruelty”. Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma 13, 527-537. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40653-019-00277-x

Thompson, K. L. and Gullone, E. (2006). “An investigation into the association between the witnessing of animal abuse and adolescents’ behavior toward animals”. Society & Animals 14(3), 221-243. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853006778149163

McDonald, S. E. et al. (2017). “Concomitant Exposure to Animal Maltreatment and Socioemotional Adjustment among Children Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence”. Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40653-017-0176-6

Graña, J. L. et al. (2004). “Effects of Viewing Videos of Bullfights on Spanish Children”. Aggressive Behavior 30, 16-28. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.20005

Guillén-Corchado, D. (2024). “Emotional impact of watching bullfighting shows in Spanish and Portuguese children”. Acta Psychologica 248, 104408. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104408