Aggression, Violence, and Mental Health in Childhood and Adolescence: Developmental Pathways, Contextual Risks, and Prevention

Aggression and violence in childhood and adolescence emerge across multiple social contexts, including peer relationships, families, schools, communities, and digital environments. Experiences such as bullying, peer victimization, cybervictimization, maltreatment, family violence, and other forms of interpersonal aggression can shape emotional, social, behavioral, and psychiatric development, with important implications for mental health and wellbeing across the life course.

This Research Topic will bring together research that advances understanding of how aggression, violence, and victimization develop across childhood and adolescence, and how they intersect with mental health. We welcome contributions examining developmental pathways, risk and protective factors, and the social, relational, and environmental conditions under which aggressive behavior and violence emerge, persist, or can be prevented. Particular emphasis will be placed on social-ecological and contextual mechanisms, including family processes, peer and school dynamics, community adversity, digital environments, and broader structural influences.

The topic is intended to include a broad range of aggression- and violence-related phenomena, including peer aggression, bullying, cyberaggression, family violence, child maltreatment, community, collective, and societal violence, exposure to violence, and related victimization experiences. We are especially interested in work that clarifies links with internalizing and externalizing symptoms, trauma-related outcomes, emotional dysregulation, social adjustment, and other indicators of child and adolescent mental health. Contributions addressing developmental psychopathology, equity-relevant perspectives, and cross-cultural differences are particularly encouraged.

Submissions may also address prevention approaches, especially upstream and context-sensitive strategies in family, school, community, and digital settings, where there is a strong empirical or translational basis. The overall aim of the Research Topic is to advance a developmentally informed and clinically relevant understanding of aggression and violence in young people, with clear implications for mental health research, prevention, and early intervention.

Suggested areas for submissions include:
• developmental pathways linking aggression, violence, and victimization with child and adolescent mental health;
• peer aggression, bullying, cybervictimization, and cyberaggression;
• family violence, harsh parenting, child maltreatment, and exposure to interpersonal violence;
• community, collective, and societal violence, including neighbourhood violence, war, armed conflict, political violence, and displacement;
•relational, physical, verbal, and indirect forms of aggression across development;
•risk and protective factors across family, peer, school, community, and digital contexts;
•aggression and violence in relation to depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-harm, behavioral difficulties, and social functioning;
•emotional regulation, stress reactivity, attachment, and other developmental or psychological mechanisms;
•bias-based victimization, discrimination, and aggression affecting minoritized or vulnerable groups;
•cross-cultural, longitudinal, and multi-informant studies of aggression, violence, and mental health;
•prevention and early intervention approaches targeting aggression, victimization, and violence exposure in childhood and adolescence;
•and systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and rigorous methodological contributions relevant to the topic.

To maintain a clear scope, this Research Topic is not primarily focused on adult populations without direct developmental relevance to childhood or adolescence, forensic risk assessment or criminal offending frameworks as the main emphasis, or treatment and rehabilitation of severe violent offending in correctional or forensic settings as the central focus. Papers focused primarily on aggression without meaningful developmental or mental health relevance would also fall outside the intended scope.

If you did not receive an official call for participation from the Topic Editors but wish to submit, you are welcome to do so; however, please contact us at childandadolescentpsychiatry@frontiersin.org before submitting and wait for our confirmation that your manuscript is within scope.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: emotional dysregulation, family violence, externalizing symptoms, internalizing symptoms, community violence, Child Mental Health, Adolescent Mental Health, Developmental Pathways, Risks and protective factors, peer aggression, bullying

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.