Spain decides 12 is too young for making love - so how about 13?

"WE don't want to criminalise a kiss between adolescents." This was how Spain's conservative Justice Minister, Margarita Mariscal de Gante, prefaced her proposal to raise the age of sexual consent which, at 12, is the lowest in Europe.

Faced with a spate of child pornography and child prostitution scandals, Spanish lawyers have been deliberating over the fact that there is no such offence as "corruption of minors".

Government attempts to raise the age of consent to 15, in line with EU directives, are at an early stage - a compromise on 13 is in the offing - but opposition socialists are already warning of "repression against sexual freedom"and of "returning to an idealised national-catholic model of society".

While Britain creeps towards lowering the age of homosexual consent to 16, for Spaniards both gay and straight sex has been permitted from the age of 12 since 1822, and a girl can marry at 14.

A climate of sexual tolerance that coexisted for decades with some of the fiercest political repression in Europe also provided a smokescreen for child abusers. Faced with evidence of sexual aggression against children, and the proliferation of child pornography on the Internet, Spanish politicians have decided that the penal code needs tightening up.

The minister wants harsher prison terms to "protect young people's liberty" and to introduce the crime of corruption of minors for "acts that initiate minors into a precocious or premature sexual life or acts of a sexual nature whose intensity, persistence or continuity can alter the normal development of the personality".

Critics say this formulation introduces moral judgements far beyond the remit of the legal system. But everyone acknowledges there are gaps in the law.

And so, to illicit, adolescent kisses. The minister proposes to make it illegal for someone between 13 and 15 to have sexual relations with someone over 18, on pain of four to 12 years' jail. But the opposition says this will make a legal relationship between a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old a crime on the older partner's 18th birthday. Most Spaniards would consider this a ludicrous impediment to natural sexual apprenticeship.