School violence linked to stronger risk of teens attacking parents when family abuse present

Adolescents involved in school violence are more likely to report physically attacking a parent, and that link becomes substantially stronger among teenagers who have also witnessed violence between their parents, according to a new cross-sectional study of more than 5,000 Swedish adolescents published in BMC Public Health.

Child-to-parent violence, in which a child uses physical aggression against a parent, remains one of the least studied forms of family violence. The research team, led by Robert Svensson with colleagues Lisa Andersson and Björn Johnson, set out to test whether two violent contexts that adolescents often occupy at once, the school and the home, act independently or in combination. Their hypothesis was that involvement in school violence, whether as a victim, a perpetrator, or both, would be more strongly associated with physical child-to-parent violence among adolescents who had themselves been exposed to parental violence.

The data come from a large survey conducted in 35 schools in southern Sweden. The sample comprised 5,052 adolescents, of whom 46.7 percent were male, with an average age of 16.2 years and a standard deviation of 1.55. The researchers used linear probability models to estimate the associations between school violence, exposure to parental violence, and physical child-to-parent violence, allowing them to test both the main associations and the interaction the hypothesis predicted.

The results showed that involvement in school violence was positively associated with physical child-to-parent violence across all three roles examined: victim, perpetrator, and victim-perpetrator. In other words, adolescents who reported being bullied or violent at school were also more likely to report having used physical violence against a parent, regardless of which role they occupied in school violence.

More striking was the interaction finding. The association between school violence involvement and physical child-to-parent violence was stronger among adolescents who had been exposed to parental violence than among those who had not. This supports the study’s central hypothesis and suggests that the two violent contexts do not simply add together but appear to amplify one another in relation to violence directed at parents.

The authors emphasize that the study underscores the importance of exploring how different contexts interact in their associations with child-to-parent violence. If the same adolescent is embedded in violence at school and witnesses violence at home, the combined exposure appears to matter more than either context alone, a pattern that points toward the value of prevention efforts that consider adolescents’ full environments rather than treating school and family settings in isolation.

Several limitations follow from the study design. The data are cross-sectional, collected at a single point in time, so the findings show associations rather than causal effects, and the direction of influence between school violence, parental violence exposure, and violence against parents cannot be established from this data. The sample comes from schools in southern Sweden, and the authors themselves frame the interactions as raising a key question for future research: how to develop effective preventive strategies that take these overlapping contexts into account.

Even with those caveats, the study adds to a small evidence base on a form of family violence that can be highly damaging yet is rarely the focus of large-scale research. By showing that exposure to parental violence moderates the link between school violence and physical child-to-parent violence, the findings give researchers and practitioners a more nuanced picture of which adolescents may face the greatest risk, and they highlight how violence in one setting can shape the meaning and consequences of violence in another.

Subject of Research: The association between school violence and physical child-to-parent violence: is exposure to parental violence a moderator?

Article Title: The association between school violence and physical child-to-parent violence: is exposure to parental violence a moderator?

Article References: Svensson, R., Andersson, L., & Johnson, B. (2026). The association between school violence and physical child-to-parent violence: is exposure to parental violence a moderator?. BMC Public Health, 26(1), Article 2682. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29657-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29657-3

Keywords: association, between, school, violence, physical, child-to-parent, exposure, parental, moderator, scientific research