Children, violence and vulnerability 2025
REPORT 1
The scale of violence affecting children
Violence is common, with a minority experiencing serious violence requiring medical treatment.
Violence continues to shape the lives of too many teenage children. In the past year, nearly one in five (18%) said they had been a victim, one in eight (13%) admitted to carrying out violence themselves, and half (50%) told us they had witnessed violence being committed against someone else.
For many, these were not isolated incidents:
Almost two-thirds of victims and perpetrators said violence had happened more than once.
The violence teenage children experienced took many forms — from physical and sexual assault to robbery and threats with weapons. And the consequences were often severe. Nearly three in ten victims (29%), equivalent to 5.2% of all teenage children in England and Wales, needed medical treatment from a doctor or a hospital.
When teenage children caused serious harm to others (where the victim required treatment from a doctor or at hospital), there were responses from adults in authority in almost all cases (90%). Nearly three in ten said they got in trouble at school (29%), and around a quarter said they either excluded from school (24%) or that the police were involved (24%). Yet fewer than four in ten said they were offered support to stop it from happening again (39%). This imbalance suggests that while punishments are common, help to address the underlying causes is far less consistent.
Most teenage children are exposed to online discussions about harming others.
While half of 13-17-year-olds witnessed violence in person, even more encountered it online.
70%
said they had seen real-world violence shared on social media in the past year – including fights, threats, weapons and glorifying violence and sexual violence.
Against the backdrop of the 2024 summer riots, we also wanted to understand whether discussions about harming specific groups are appearing in what teenage children see online, and the extent to which teens are engaging with these discussions.
The findings are stark. In the past year, more than four in five 13-17-year-olds had seen conversations online about hurting (physically or emotionally) specific groups and over a third said they’d taken part in these conversations, either to support or challenge those opinions. Migrants were the most frequent target, but this was followed closely by conversations about harming people based on their skin colour or ethnicity and gender identity.
Young people report that being continuously exposed to violent content online is impacting their day-to-day lives.
Listen to a conversation our Youth Advisory Board had on the matter.
Victimisation and perpetration go hand in hand.
The boundary between being a victim of violence or a perpetrator of violence is often blurred. Two in five victims (39%) had carried out violence, while more than half of perpetrators (53%) had also been victims. The overlap was even greater in serious cases: almost half (49%) of victims who needed medical treatment said they had also perpetrated violence, while over three-quarters (77%) of perpetrators whose actions caused injury had themselves been victims.
Victimisation was also closely linked to weapon carrying. Seventy-nine per cent of teenage children who’d carried a weapon in the past year had been a victim of violence, making them five times more likely to have been a victim than those not carrying weapons. They were 14 times more likely to have been a victim of repeated incidents of violence, suggesting that cycles of violence may drive some children to arm themselves for defence, retaliation or other reasons.