The bus was driving back from a soccer tournament. It was daylight, there were witnesses, and on board a 16-year-old boy says he was raped by his own classmates. The school he attends is not an ordinary school. It is the Liceo Naval Almirante Guise in Lima, run until last week by the Peruvian navy, a place where most of the students are the children of naval officers — children of the institution that is supposed to embody the nation’s order.
What allegedly happened on September 15 has convulsed Peru. The Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation; ten teenagers from the school were initially apprehended, and a Lima court has ordered six of them held for four months in a juvenile facility pending trial. The navy has suspended several employees and administrators and says it “categorically rejects any act of violence, abuse or violation of the integrity of all students.”
The ledger nobody wanted to keep
The case lands on a country whose own ministries have been quietly tallying the rise. According to data from the Ministry of Education, reports of sexual violence among students rose 35 percent in the first eight months of 2026 — 1,198 reports, against 885 in the same period of 2025. The category spans groping, acts of a sexual nature, harassment, cyberbullying and rape. And the Liceo Naval itself kept its own quiet ledger: Education Minister José Antonio Chang told the newspaper El Comercio that the school has recorded 50 reports of violence among students over the past two years, 12 of them involving alleged sexual misconduct such as harassment, inappropriate touching or assault.
Cornelio Gonzáles, director of the Regional Education Office of Metropolitan Lima, has accused school administrators of something more damaging than absence: negligence. The school, he alleges, did not report the incident to police or other authorities as protocol requires. In its statement to parents, the school said it acted “immediately” and has cooperated with the investigations, adding: “If responsibility is established, the appropriate disciplinary measures will be taken.”
A curriculum emptied out
Experts who spoke to CNN place the assault inside a system that has been methodically weakened. In May, complying with a law pushed by the conservative majority in Congress, the Ministry of Education issued new sex education guidelines built on what it called “scientific, biological, and ethical principles.” Critics note what the guidelines omit: sexual rights, orientation, gender identity, equality — the vocabulary, they say, with which abuse is recognized and prevented.
Researcher Eduardo Cárcamo, a specialist in gender and masculinity studies, called the case “the tip of the iceberg” and warned against the “normalization of the situation.”
Politicians have fought so hard to roll back comprehensive sex education in schools that they forgot to strengthen it.
Cárcamo described a pedagogy of masculinity that runs deeper than any curriculum: “There’s something specific about the way we’ve been taught to be men: it’s always about constantly proving it. And one way to do that is by controlling the other person. We men have learned that if we can comment on the body, we can also touch it. If we can comment on it and touch it, we can also assault it and rape it.”
Privilege, and the impunity it breeds
Giselle Silva, a psychotherapist with a doctorate in child and adolescent psychopathology and founder of the Casita de los Picaflores community psychology center in Cusco, reads the school itself as part of the problem — “institutions characterized above all by privilege and power structures, where there is even a sense of impunity,” where disciplining the children of influential officers is chronically difficult. She described “a system riddled with machismo, subjugation, and hierarchical structures that distort and reinforce” the violence.
“Being masculine means subjugating others, within a system where empathy for another’s suffering is lost and the other person’s body becomes an object,” Silva said. But she refuses to let the navy’s walls carry the whole blame: the problem runs through a society that “is becoming more unbearably violent every day,” with young people who are “very alone” and absorbing values “centered on the imposition of power.” Prevention, she argues, must address that solitude, not just sex education.
Two fathers’ words, a mother’s demand
President Keiko Fujimori has demanded “a rigorous and swift investigation” into what she called a “very serious” case, insisting the guilty face “the full weight of the law.” Jorge Petrozzi, the lawyer for the boy’s family, told CNN the defendants, prosecuted as juveniles, could face “between six and eight years” if convicted — and that he intends to pursue criminal and civil action “against all those responsible,” potentially including adults who were present and failed to stop the assault, and educational authorities.
The father of one of the detained teenagers asked local media not to ruin the lives of the suspects. “They were playing on the bus; it got out of hand,” he said — before adding that those responsible should still “have to pay” and that the victim was “absolutely right.” The victim’s mother, speaking to Panamericana television, answered the minimization directly: the attack “was not physical aggression or a joke; (but) rape, a sexual assault.” She asked for justice “without hatred or revenge.”
Cárcamo says society must finally “address the fact that there is another way to be a man – one free from violence,” and laments that in Peru such an effort “isn’t even in its infancy.” Silva’s judgment is colder still. “This isn’t going to get better,” she said. “Rather, it will continue to get worse as long as there isn’t this culture of acknowledgment, starting at the highest levels.”