On childhood, violence, and what a community chooses to consecrate as culture
Within municipalities along the Costa del Sol, two distinct languages of cultural policy coexist. Large-scale events promoting animal welfare, featuring artists and guests, are presented as initiatives of culture, solidarity, and civic engagement. Conversely, there exists an agenda that elevates bullfighting: lectures, salon bullfighting classes, and the promotion of the bullring as a sociocultural space, facilitated by bullfighting organisations and institutional support. These are left unnamed so that the contradiction remains apparent.
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, this contradiction is not merely moral; it possesses legal status. Act 7/2023 recognises and protects animal welfare, yet it expressly excludes animals utilised in bullfighting spectacles from its scope. Furthermore, Act 18/2013 safeguards bullfighting as cultural heritage worthy of protection. The same legal framework that provides protection for certain animals excludes others from such safeguards by invoking culture. What may appear to be a local inconsistency in one municipality is, in reality, the faithful application of a national exception.
I state this not to debate whether bullfighting entails actual harm to an animal—which it does—but to observe 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.
One must not simplify the evidence itself. Specific studies regarding minors and bullfighting point in differing directions: one, utilising videos of bullfights, associated certain content with increased aggression in male children; another, more recent, does not confirm a simple negative effect and even qualifies any linear interpretation. I cite both intentionally, as intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that the matter remains unresolved. Even with this acknowledgement, the precautionary principle holds: when evidence regarding a risk to minors is reasonable, albeit not conclusive, prudence does not await certainty.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has spoken on this matter twice. In 2018, it recommended that Spain prohibit the participation of minors under eighteen in bullfighting spectacles, both as bullfighters and as spectators. In 2026, it went further: concerned that children continue to witness violence and death at bullfighting festivals, it requested that the minimum age for participation in events, festivals, and bullfighting schools be set at eighteen, without exception, and that awareness be raised 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 charged with safeguarding the rights of children.
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.
For the cultural aura is not merely an ornament; it is the mechanism. Bullfighting shields itself by invoking Picasso, art, and shared heritage. Aestheticisation does not accompany violence; it transforms it into something else in the eyes of the observer, particularly those of a child who is still learning which aspects of the world merit 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 that it is worthy of contemplation. It is educating a perspective.
Culture is never neutral. It does not merely reflect what a society is; it produces sensitivity or blunts it, publicly deciding what merits admiration and what does not. Choosing what we present to childhood as valuable is one of the most profound pedagogical acts a community performs, though it is rarely named as such. A community that teaches its children to applaud the suffering of a living being because it is sanctioned 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 is not whether bullfighting is art. It is simpler and more uncomfortable: what are we teaching a child to see when we teach them to view this, and why have we decided that the word heritage suffices to ensure the question remains unasked?
On the 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