The emotional policies on childhood and internet: Spanish case

Abstract

The new policies on children and the internet reflect a paradoxical construction of children as right holders and users in virtual environments. This article offers an analysis of how children’s rights are integrated into children and internet policy. It explores the collective emotions behind public narratives on children and internet, taking into account global discourses on children’s rights and the Spanish national context. In order to understand how emotions operate in public narratives and politics, it analyses discursively international and national policy documents (legal text, political debates, official reports, programmes and guides) about children and internet, produced between 2000 and 2018. It shows that although internet has been presented as space where children are able to participate in a global citizenship, there is a strong tendency to criminalize this participation and emphasizing the potential risks to which children are exposed as users. This is the results of a regulatory framework where collective emotions play an important role to portray childhood as a social group with lack of competence rather than children as subjects with rights to participate.