The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) has published a new report exploring children’s experiences of violence in England and Wales as part of its annual Children, violence and vulnerability research. The YEF surveyed nearly 11,000 13- to 17-year-olds about their experiences. Findings include: physical assault was the most common type of violence experienced; while half of the teenagers in the survey said they had witnessed violence in person, even more said they had encountered it online with 70% seeing real-world violence shared on social media in the past year; and 82% reported seeing social media posts about harming specific groups such as migrants or people of certain ethnicities or sexualities. The report includes calls for social skills training, mentoring and sports programmes to help reduce violence in the real world and help children navigate content online.
Read the news story: Posting, protests and polarisation: the divisive content filling teens’ feeds
Read the report: The scale of violence affecting children
Source: Youth Endowment Fund
Date published: 24 November 2025
