Lucía has been at the Els Til·lers juvenile center for nine months, the only facility in the juvenile justice system for girls in Catalonia. She turned 18 in January, but she will finish at the center the internment that was imposed on her when she was still a minor. She asserts that living at the center "is not as bad as they paint it": "It is not like a prison, here at the end of the day we are girls".

Prosecutor's Office warning regarding delinquency among minors. The chief prosecutor of Catalonia, Francisco Bañeres, explained this Friday that crimes committed by minors increased last year by 4.5%. Among these, the 17% increase in robbery crimes with violence or intimidation stands out particularly.

The Ceuta Juvenile Prosecutor's Office has transferred to the court several complaints from underage girls who arrived alone in the Spanish enclave during the mass entry between July 30 and 31 and who claim to have suffered abuse or harassment in reception centers of the regional protection network. As reported by El País and confirmed by sources from the Ceuta Prosecutor's Office, the public ministry has become aware of "some complaints" filed with the police, which have been placed at the disposal of the judicial body.

Both of them work in the same business, live in the same town and are no more than ten years apart in age. The first one says it is evident, undeniable, that the city's landscape has changed. Like practically that of all cities. But she does not believe that there is more insecurity. "I live peacefully. But perhaps my colleague will not tell you the same," she comments as she leaves the establishment. Her colleague, of foreign origin, assures that there is a lot of insecurity, that her mother was mugged recently. "And have you seen what is happening in Ceuta?", she says indignantly while pointing at the television, which at that precise moment shows a close-up of the mayor of Manresa, Marc Aloy.

Records show that crimes committed by minors are decreasing, but the Public Prosecutor's Office warns of the opposite. There are increasingly more crimes that cannot be prosecuted because the offender is under 14 years old and, therefore, has not reached the age of criminal responsibility. These cases do not appear in the counts of convictions for minors, but there are more and more of them. In the last year, they have risen by 74%, according to the count from the State Attorney General's Office: last year 4,448 cases were archived because the offender was unaccountable, while in 2023 there were 7,749. However, the Prosecutor's Office warns that the exact figure should be taken with reservations due to a possible error in the 2024 records in Andalusia. Nationwide, in 2023, 11,143 cases were archived for this reason, 7,660 in 2022, and 8,433 in 2021. "The age of commission of criminal acts is progressively dropping," warns the Prosecutor's Office report presented this Thursday.

Absence of paternal figures, lack of supervision during childhood, school absenteeism, difficulty in emotional management, impulsivity, low commitment to society. These were some of the conclusions of the psychologists who had treated the two minors, aged 15 and 16, arrested last week in Manresa for the fatal stabbing of a 45-year-old man. Both had criminal records and both, as ARA has been able to reconstruct from various sources, have had a troubled childhood and have caused constant conflicts in the centers where they were educated, from which this complex situation had been repeatedly warned about.

The two teenagers aged fifteen and sixteen arrested this week for allegedly killing a man in Manresa during the main festival had already been arrested before for cases unrelated to this week's fatal stabbing in the Bages region. In fact, one of them—the fifteen-year-old—had been interned until a few weeks ago as a precautionary measure in a case in which he is being investigated for a robbery with violence and attempted homicide in April, and at the time of the crime he was on supervised release, according to sources familiar with the case who spoke to ARA.

The judge ordered this Wednesday evening the internment in a closed regime for the two minors arrested for the violent death of a man in Manresa. For one of the adolescents, in addition, therapeutic treatment has been decreed. Both are charged with a crime of homicide. The juvenile prosecutor had already requested this afternoon as a precautionary measure the admission of the two arrested individuals.

Commitment of the Government to the reception of minors arriving in Ceuta following the latest migratory crisis. The President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, reiterated this Friday at the meeting of the Catalan executive in Os de Balaguer that Catalonia will act "with solidarity, responsibility, and rigor" in the face of the Ceuta tragedy and the need to welcome minors. Precisely for this reason, he defended the "reception capacity" of immigrants due to the "humanitarian crisis," but also emphasized the need for secure borders and clear rules. The Generalitat already made clear from the first day its open-door approach to reception, even though Catalonia would not, in principle, have to take in more unaccompanied minors because its ratio is much higher than that of most autonomous communities.

The Spanish government and the autonomous communities have agreed to give the green light to an extraordinary 25 million euros to strengthen Ceuta's resources for the reception of unaccompanied migrant minors. This was unanimously voted by the Ministers of Childhood and Youth at the sectoral conference held this Thursday. However, the communities in which Vox holds these responsibilities after agreements with the PP were not present; that is, Aragon, Castile and León, and Extremadura. In fact, the Minister of Childhood and Youth, Sira Rego, explained that they not only failed to attend the meeting but also communicated in writing that they were against the extra budgetary allocation.

The Civil Guard is investigating the discovery of the bodies of an Irish couple, aged 50 and 45, inside a house in the Cap Blanc urbanization in Cullera, in the Valencian region of Ribera Baixa. It was their two minor children, aged 14 and 15, who found the lifeless bodies this Tuesday afternoon. According to sources close to the investigation and as reported by Efe, the couple showed apparent signs of having consumed drugs.

The magistrate Joaquim Bosch (Cullera, 1965) speaks to ARA to explain the special protection of immigrant minors who are in Ceuta under the care of the Spanish authorities.

Eighteen days after the entry of tens of thousands of people from Morocco to Ceuta, the European Commission maintains its position on the future of migrants who remain in the autonomous city. The community executive has argued that all of them should be returned, including the more than two thousand minors who have entered without adult relatives and to whom community law and Spanish immigration law itself grant special protection. Brussels argues that European Union law also provides for them to be returned. "We continue to insist that the expectation is that all those who are irregularly in Ceuta will be returned," said the spokesman for the Internal Affairs commission, Markus Lammert, this Tuesday at a press conference.

The PP is already putting obstacles in the way of the distribution of unaccompanied migrant minors in Ceuta. In the technical meeting with the Ministry of Childhood and Youth held this Thursday, it was agreed that the sectoral conference on childhood and adolescence to address this distribution among the autonomous communities would be held on August 27, but the Popular Party has refused to include on the agenda of this upcoming meeting an informational and debate point on, precisely, the care of these minors and their situation in Ceuta, according to ministry sources. Instead, the approval of an extraordinary credit of 25 million euros to expand resources for the care of minors would be voted on.

Marta Vergés is a lawyer specializing in minors, but she has two very clear red lines. The first is that she only represents minors whom she has to defend; she never brings accusations, because she says she feels "unable" to accuse a teenager. However, she never defends the same teenager twice. All the young people she helps know this condition, which she uses to encourage them not to reoffend: "When defending a minor, there is a very high degree of hope for social reintegration, and that is what I love about my job," she explains.

Court-appointed lawyers are receiving more attention, but precariousness means fewer and fewer professionals are willing to participate in this service. Across Catalonia, the exodus has been halved, coinciding with an agreement to improve remuneration, but the figures have not improved in the Barcelona demarcation, where the Bar Association of Barcelona (Icab) warns that the loss of professionals is 20% in the last decade. Xavier Batlle and Núria Astorgas are two of the professionals who have not wanted to abandon this task. Despite having the same job, they are court-appointed lawyers in two completely different specialities: minors, whose activity in Barcelona has increased by 10% in the last semester, and second chance, a mechanism that allows good-faith debtors to cancel their debts and which has grown by 23% in the last six months.

They called themselves Los 300, but there were many fewer. They posted videos singing songs about the strength of their group, lyrics that also sought to attract new members. They also published images of fights, assaults, weapons, and the symbolism that united them. They met in the squares and parks of Sant Martí, Sant Andreu, or Nou Barris, first to commit anti-social acts, but, over time, the level of violence increased, to the point of committing assaults with machetes or swords. They also dealt drugs to finance themselves as a group, imposing rules and tests to become one of them and recruiting minors to turn them into their executioners. Over the months, they became a youth gang, one of the most active in Barcelona.

Night of riots in Mataró. The Mossos d'Esquadra had already reinforced their uniformed presence in the Cerdanyola neighborhood of the capital of Maresme after an eviction this Tuesday ended with three minors arrested for throwing blunt objects, such as paving stones, at the police line. These actions against the police, however, were repeated at night, according to Mossos sources. A group of young people burned a dozen containers and threw stones and incendiary devices at the police. In total, the Mossos made five arrests, four of them minors.

The Olympic Village murderer earned this nickname the night he was celebrating his 18th birthday. A few hours made the difference between being tried as a minor or as an adult —as happened with the rest of those involved in the beating to death of a 24-year-old in a car park. It was April 1, 2000, and only four months had passed since the law on criminal responsibility of minors had been approved, with a less punitive model focused on education and reintegration. Now, this norm has once again faced pressure from the far-right and victims' families to increase criminal penalties for minors who commit extremely violent crimes, murders, or rapes.

Silvia Guerrero learned on August 21 that her son Juan had been stabbed that early morning in a fight in Tàrrega. He was 18 years old and was only a few months older than the sole accused of his death, who was 17. She still doesn't know when the trial for her son's death will be, and since then she has dedicated herself to demanding that the criminal consequences for minors be more severe and more similar to those assumed by adults. With the families of four victims, a month ago they presented 130,000 signatures in Congress to demand it. Juan's family has requested that the accused of killing him serve eight years of confinement, the maximum provided by law.