School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-9-2025
Abstract
Youth violence—the deliberate use of physical force or harm by young people between the ages of 10 and 24 to intimidate or cause harm to others, both online and offline—is a critical public health issue in the United States. Yet, successfully predicting future violent offenders is a complex and challenging task, as the question of why some youths resort to extreme violence while others refrain from it—despite facing similar risk factors—remains widely debated. This article highlights both risk and protective factors of youth violence through a socio-ecological lens to offer a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted factors driving youth violence in the United States. To understand the interconnectedness between individual factors and the broader environments in which individuals are embedded, we outline the risk and protective factors related to youth violence across five socio-ecological levels: (1) individual, (2) interpersonal, (3) neighborhood, (4) cultural, and (5) life course. Approaching youth violence from a holistic lens offers a greater opportunity to mitigate contributing factors and to address the deleterious impacts of this complex issue. Practice and research implications are discussed.
Recommended Citation
Paat, Y.-F., Yeager, K. H., Cruz, E. M., Cole, R., & Torres-Hostos, L. R. (2025). Understanding Youth Violence Through a Socio-Ecological Lens. Social Sciences, 14(7), 424. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci14070424
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
Social Sciences
DOI
10.3390/socsci14070424
Comments
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).