Violence against adolescents can have strong, long-lasting effects on brain function, mental health, health risk behaviours, risk of non-communicable diseases, risk of infectious diseases such as HIV and STIs and social functioning.

WHO recommends that child abuse interventions be multifaceted to address the specific needs of adolescents more effectively, including enhancement of professional training and education about the nature and impact of adolescent maltreatment among all cadres of health professionals; development and scale-up of prevention and treatment services for maltreated adolescents and their families; and systems that better assess and intervene with maltreated adolescents. Furthermore, these interventions should consider intersecting factors that add to the risk of violence and abuse among specific groups of adolescents, such as those with disabilities, and that affect their access to appropriate services and support. Comprehensive activities that help to prevent violence and that involve all stakeholders who are important in a young person’s life have proved to be more effective in preventing violence than activities that focus only on one particular target group. This approach encourages entire schools and communities to share the same vision of reducing violence, and it supports teachers, health care workers, parents and the community to work with adolescents towards this common goal.

Digital technology is now a regular part of adolescence. Digital technologies provide many benefits, but they also can harm. Violence against children online, also called technology-facilitated violence, is the use of computers, mobile phones or other forms of digital communication to access, threaten and/or harm children or adolescents. It can result in short- and long-term physical, sexual or emotional suffering. Online violence takes many forms. Sometimes adolescents meet future perpetrators for the first time online. Sexual abuse can be filmed and the images disseminated online. Unsolicited texting of sexual material (“sexting”) and sexual extortion can include sending sexual messages or images to children or pressuring children to send sexually explicit messages or images, or using these without consent. Online contact can try to lure a child into meeting for sexual contact. In other instances, bullying in school can continue through social media at home, exposing young people to online threats or hate speech (including racist, homophobic and sexist messages.)

WHO suggests the following strategies to counteract online violence against adolescents:

• Strengthen laws and improve enforcement. This can be achieved by enacting comprehensive national legislation to protect young people from violence online and offline. Training law enforcement to recognize and respond to online abuse and creating safe and accessible reporting mechanisms are important parts of the structural response.
• Address risk factors that make children vulnerable to recruitment by sex offenders. Poverty, drug use and neglect are known determinants of child recruitment. Address these risks by improving economic opportunities, preventing drug use and stabilizing families.
• Provide technological oversight. Working with digital services providers, embed safety features in the design of online services, reduce production and dissemination of child sexual abuse imagery, and prevent abusers from using digital platforms to access young people.
• Engage parents, caregivers and teachers. Parenting programmes can teach parents how to talk to their children about online safety. Digital safety should be integrated into school curricula, and teachers should be trained to respond to online threats or abuse.