Peru's Congress examines social media harm to children as experts urge new legal controls

Peru's Congress has turned its attention to the toll that heavy social media use is taking on the country's children, with senators and specialists gathering in Lima to argue that unlimited screen time is damaging the mental health of thousands of school pupils and demands a legislative response.

The forum, held on Monday 12 October and organised by Senator Katherine Ampuero Meza of the Renovación Popular party, brought together education officials, public health specialists and mental health researchers to examine the impact of screens on Peruvian childhood and adolescence. The discussion came as parallel concern was aired in Chile, where experts and authorities met in Santiago to analyse the challenges facing children in the face of social media, a sign that the question is moving up the public agenda across Latin America.

A call for legal mechanisms

Ampuero told the Lima event that the use of social media by children and adolescents had taken a leading place on the public agenda, and that Congress carried a responsibility to bring forward legislative proposals. Regulation, she said, was also a matter of state policy that the executive needed to evaluate, arguing that public resources should not be spent on problems that run counter to school health, including violence.

She lamented a case of extreme violence at the Liceo Naval school, which she said had left serious consequences for the mental health of one student. Following that case, she warned of an urgent need for official statistics that would show the true extent of aggression across the country's schools, which she said was currently unknown.

More than 1.2 million attendances

Figures presented at the forum put the scale of the problem in health terms. According to the discussion, official health bodies in Peru, including the Ministry of Health (Minsa), EsSalud and the National Institute of Mental Health "Honorio Delgado. Hideyo Noguchi" (INSM), have classified the problem as a critical public health challenge.

Participants heard that Minsa has already recorded more than 1.2 million psychological attendances involving minors, and that the mental and emotional health of school pupils has become the country's biggest national concern. Among the most common conditions are depression and anxiety, which the forum heard are triggered by mass social media use. Pupils who spend more than five hours a day in front of screens face up to 4.5 times the risk of suffering these disorders, according to the figures given at the event.

The national education plan

Ada Gallegos Ruiz, of the National Education Council, set out how the national education project to 2036 addresses mobile devices, describing work on healthy habits and monitoring that begins in the home and is reinforced by teaching in schools. The aim, she said, is to prevent anxiety, depression and other conditions that limit pupils' capacity for reflection, and she argued that new rules are needed to improve the situation.

A wide range of specialists took part alongside her: Ricardo Zapata La Rosa, representing the Presidency of the Council of Ministers; Omar Neyra, a public health specialist; Rosalía Hernández, a specialist in school tutoring, guidance and coexistence; and María Gutiérrez, a specialist in relational systemic family therapy, among other guests.

Regulation, not a blind ban

The participants set out their contributions and points of view, and agreed on the need to establish legal mechanisms to address a problem that, they said, affects thousands of students across several regions of the country. They proposed an integrated strategy combining the home, the school and psychology, and were precise about the shape they wanted regulation to take: not a blind prohibition, but a gradual, regulated process with the intervention of the state.

The forum also heard that the health consequences of intensive social media and screen use among children and adolescents are multidimensional, spanning education and social life as well as physical and mental health.

The meeting in Lima took place as the question of children and social media was being examined beyond Peru's borders. At a separate gathering in Santiago, experts and authorities met to analyse the challenges facing childhood in the face of the impact of social networks, underlining that legislators and public bodies in the region are being asked to respond to the same set of pressures on young people's mental health.

For Peruvian families, the significance of the congressional forum lies in what was put on the record: a senator signalling legislative intent, health ministry attendance figures for minors already above 1.2 million, and a documented increase in risk linked to more than five hours of daily screen exposure. The event closed with the speakers' shared conclusion that existing arrangements are not sufficient, and that new legal and administrative mechanisms are needed to control unlimited social media use among children and adolescents. Whether and when such legislation follows was not stated at the meeting.

Anyone affected by the issues in this article can contact Samaritans free on 116 123 or at samaritans.org.

For readers asking what this means for them, our guides cover the full case files, how long people have to claim, the UK under-16 social media ban, who can claim, how a social media harm claim works, the court cases we report and the case against the platforms.