Childhood Physical Abuse Predicts Teen Bullying Risk, With Discrimination and School Transitions Playing Key Roles

Adolescents who were physically abused in childhood face a strikingly elevated risk of being physically victimized by their peers years later, and new longitudinal research from China is now mapping out exactly how that risk travels through time. A three-wave study of 970 adolescents in Chongqing, published in Current Psychology, followed students through the turbulent school transitions that mark the end of middle school and the end of junior high, measuring childhood physical abuse, perceived discrimination, and experiences of physical victimization at six-month intervals. The findings offer one of the most detailed portraits to date of how early family violence can echo forward into a teenager’s social world, and they identify a specific psychological mechanism, the perception of being discriminated against, that appears to carry much of that risk.

The research team, led by Xiaofang Shen, Manlu Wang, Zhi Wang, and Jingjin Shao of Southwest University, grounded their work in the cycle of violence theory, a framework holding that exposure to violence in one context, typically the home, increases the likelihood of involvement in violence in other contexts later in development. In this case, the question was not whether abused children become aggressive, but whether they become targets. Physical victimization, meaning being hit, shoved, kicked, or otherwise physically attacked by peers, is one of the most common and damaging forms of bullying among Chinese adolescents, with consequences ranging from academic decline to depression and self-harm. Understanding which children are most vulnerable, and why, has become an urgent public health question.

The study’s design gave it unusual statistical power for answering that question. Rather than surveying students once and inferring causal direction from correlations, the researchers collected data at three points, each six months apart, from adolescents in Grade 9, the final year of middle school, and Grade 11, the second year of senior high school. These grades were chosen deliberately because both represent school transition periods, moments when students change buildings, peer groups, and social hierarchies all at once. A total of 970 adolescents provided complete data across all three waves, allowing the team to construct what statisticians call a moderated mediation model, a design that can test whether one variable explains the link between two others, and whether that explanatory pathway changes strength depending on a third condition.

The core result confirmed the grim prediction of the cycle of violence framework: childhood physical abuse, measured with a validated Chinese version of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, positively predicted later physical victimization by peers. Adolescents who reported being physically abused at home in childhood were significantly more likely to report being physically attacked at school months later. But the more revealing finding concerned the mechanism in between. Perceived discrimination, the subjective sense of being treated unfairly or looked down upon by others, acted as a bridge. Abused adolescents who came to perceive discrimination were markedly more likely to then experience physical victimization, suggesting that the damage of early abuse is partly transmitted through a shift in how young people read their social world.

This mediating role of perceived discrimination fits a broader body of psychological evidence. Decades of research have shown that maltreated children often develop distorted self-concepts, learned helplessness, and heightened sensitivity to hostile social cues, all of which can color their expectations of new relationships. When a child who has been hit at home interprets ambiguous peer behavior as rejection or contempt, that interpretation can become self-fulfilling. Adolescents who expect to be devalued may withdraw, appear vulnerable, or respond defensively in ways that invite aggression, while peers and even teachers may unconsciously reinforce the pattern. The new study extends this logic longitudinally, showing that the perception of discrimination measured at one wave predicted physical victimization at a later wave, a temporal ordering that strengthens the case for a genuine causal pathway rather than a mere statistical association.

The second major finding concerned timing. School transitions, the researchers hypothesized, would amplify the entire chain of risk, because transitions strip away familiar social supports and force adolescents to renegotiate their status among strangers. The data largely supported this idea, but with a crucial nuance: the moderating effect of school transitions on the pathway from childhood physical abuse through perceived discrimination to physical victimization was significant only during the senior high school transition, the move into Grade 11’s new academic environment, and not during the junior transition. In other words, the same mechanism operated differently at different developmental junctures, a result that underscores how context-specific the consequences of early maltreatment can be.

Why would the senior high transition matter more? The authors point to the distinctive pressures of that period in the Chinese educational system. The move into senior high school coincides with intense academic competition in the run-up to the gaokao, the national college entrance examination, and with the formation of entirely new peer networks in which a student’s reputation must be established from scratch. For an adolescent already carrying the psychological residue of childhood abuse, this combination of novelty, stress, and status uncertainty may sharpen perceptions of discrimination precisely when social standing is most fragile. Younger students transitioning into middle school, by contrast, may still be embedded in more continuous social environments, or may simply be at a developmental stage where the discrimination-victimization link has not yet consolidated.

The study’s implications reach well beyond academic psychology. If perceived discrimination is the conduit through which early abuse becomes later victimization, then interventions that target that perception, rather than only the behavior of bullies or the trauma history of victims, could interrupt the cycle. School-based programs that build social and emotional learning, which meta-analyses have shown to reduce victimization and improve peer relations, could be timed to coincide with senior high transitions, when the risk pathway appears strongest. Counselors working with newly transitioned students could screen for both abuse history and perceived discrimination, treating the latter not as a vague complaint but as a measurable warning sign that a vulnerable student is sliding toward peer victimization. The findings also add weight to the argument that domestic violence is never a private family matter, because its effects radiate into classrooms and playgrounds years later.

The researchers are careful about the limits of their evidence. All measures were self-reported, meaning that both abuse and victimization depend on adolescents’ willingness to disclose painful experiences, and the sample came from a single middle school in Chongqing, which may limit generalizability to other regions or to adolescents outside the school system. Six-month intervals, while far better than a single snapshot, still leave open questions about the finer-grained dynamics of how discrimination perceptions form and harden. And the moderated mediation model, however sophisticated, cannot fully rule out alternative explanations, such as unmeasured family or neighborhood factors that independently shape both abuse exposure and peer treatment.

Even with those caveats, the study makes a substantive contribution to a growing literature connecting childhood maltreatment to peer victimization, and it does so with a developmental precision that most prior work has lacked. Previous studies by overlapping research groups had already linked maltreatment to victimization through insecurity, low self-esteem, and internalizing problems; the new results add perceived discrimination to that roster of mechanisms and, critically, show that the mechanism’s power depends on where a student stands in the school career. For the 970 adolescents who took part, the message embedded in the data is sobering: the violence a child experienced at home did not stay in the past, but traveled through their sense of how the world sees them, and resurfaced most forcefully at the moment they were trying hardest to start over. For educators and clinicians, the message is more hopeful, because a pathway that can be identified can, in principle, be blocked.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal effects of childhood physical abuse on peer physical victimization among Chinese adolescents during school transitions

Article Title: Longitudinal influence of childhood physical abuse on physical victimization among Chinese adolescents during school transitions: a moderated mediation model

Article References: Longitudinal influence of childhood physical abuse on physical victimization among Chinese adolescents during school transitions: a moderated mediation model. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10055-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10055-2

Keywords: childhood physical abuse, physical victimization, peer victimization, perceived discrimination, school transitions, adolescents, cycle of violence, moderated mediation, China, bullying, childhood maltreatment, longitudinal study