Predicting Youth Violence and Distress from Online Exposure: A Symbolic Analysis of Aggregated Data

This study examines associations between adolescents’ exposure to violent content on social media and behavioural and mental-health outcomes using aggregated cross-sectional data from the Youth Endowment Fund’s 2024 Children, Violence and Vulnerability Survey (N = 10,385 adolescents aged 13–17 years in England and Wales). Logistic regression models were estimated on grouped data within a symbolic data analysis framework to assess three outcomes: violence perpetration, concern about victimization, and psychological distress captured by trouble eating, sleeping, or concentrating. Exposure to online violence was common (78.6%), as were witnessing violence in person (56.4%), victimization (17.5%), and perpetration (16.3%), and engagement with major social media platforms was widespread. In regression analyses, higher engagement with the platform most strongly associated with violent-content exposure was positively related to violence perpetration in the base model (β = 0.703, p = 0.013) but became non-significant after inclusion of an interaction with violent-content exposure, whereas the interaction between platform engagement and viewing violence was strongly associated with concern about victimization (β = 153.795, p 0.001) and psychological distress (β = 161.422, p 0.001). Across outcomes, a higher proportion of females was consistently associated with greater perpetration, concern, and distress (β = 1.43–3.41, p 0.001). Overall, these findings suggest that platform engagement alone is not uniformly associated with harm, but its combination with exposure to violent content corresponds to substantially higher levels of reported perpetration, concern, and psychological distress. Given the aggregated cross-sectional design, results should be interpreted as population-level associations rather than causal effects, while still highlighting important public-health implications and the need for age- and gender-sensitive prevention strategies including media-literacy and digital-safety interventions.