Understanding Trauma and Violence in Youth: Evidence, Contexts, and Implications for Practice and Policy

Dear Colleagues,

Exposure to trauma and violence during childhood, adolescence, and emerging adulthood represents a critical challenge to healthy development and well-being worldwide. Young people are exposed to a wide range of adversities, including child maltreatment, family and community violence, school-based victimization, peer aggression, discrimination, forced migration, armed conflict, and structural inequities. A growing body of research demonstrates that these experiences are associated with adverse mental, behavioural, physical, and social outcomes that can persist across the life course. 

Within the scope of Youth, it is increasingly recognized that trauma and violence are shaped by intersecting developmental, social, cultural, and structural contexts. Youth responses to adversity are not uniform and are influenced by family systems, peer relationships, schools, communities, and broader policy environments. There remains a pressing need for research that integrates rigorous empirical evidence with contextualized analyses and translates findings into actionable insights for youth-focused practice, prevention, and policy. 

This Special Issue aims to advance interdisciplinary scholarship on trauma and violence in youth by focussing on evidence-based research, contextual understanding, and implications for practice and policy. Submissions that foreground youth voices, equity, cultural responsiveness, and strengths-based approaches are particularly encouraged. The Special Issue aligns with Youth’s mission to publish high-quality, open-access research that advances knowledge on youth development, well-being, and social inclusion across diverse global contexts. 

This Special Issue welcomes original research articles, systematic and scoping reviews, and conceptual or methodological papers that examine trauma and violence among children, adolescents, and young adults. Contributions from psychology, social work, public health, education, sociology, criminology, global health, and related disciplines are encouraged, particularly those that emphasize interdisciplinary and youth-centered perspectives. 

Research areas may include, but are not limited to:

• Prevalence and patterns of trauma and violence exposure among youth
• Polyvictimization and cumulative adversity across developmental stages
• Family, peer, school, and community contexts of youth trauma and violence
• Structural determinants, including poverty, racism, gender inequality, disability, and migration status
• Mental, behavioural, physical, and psychosocial outcomes among youth
• Resilience, coping, post-traumatic growth, and protective factors
• Youth-informed, trauma-informed, and culturally responsive interventions
• School-, community-, and family-based prevention programs
• Youth-serving systems (education, health, child welfare, juvenile justice) and trauma-informed practices
• Policy implications and system-level responses to youth trauma and violence
• Ethical, participatory, and innovative methodological approaches in youth trauma research

By bringing together interdisciplinary and youth-centered scholarship, this Special Issue seeks to deepen understanding of trauma and violence in youth and to inform evidence-based practices and policies that promote safety, resilience, and well-being among young people across diverse sociocultural and global contexts. 

I  look forward to receiving your contributions. 

Dr. Edson Chipalo
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Youth is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• youth
• trauma
• violence
• adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)
• polyvictimization
• mental health
• resilience
• social determinants of health
• trauma-informed care
• policy and practice