Childhood maltreatment is linked to more online aggression at university

Are experiences of humiliation, rejection, or intimidation during childhood associated with a higher later frequency of cyberbullying-related aggression at university? Researchers from Chinese institutions and the University of Melbourne examined that question by separating three elements: retrospective reports of psychological maltreatment before age 16, current well-being, and online behavior directed at other people.

The team recruited students through convenience-selected classes at six universities in southern, southwestern, and central China. In June 2025, participants completed scales on childhood psychological maltreatment, subjective well-being, and difficulty describing feelings. In January 2026, about seven months later, they reported cyberbullying-related online aggression during the previous six months. The analysis included 2,019 matched responses from people with a mean age of 18.97 and adjusted the comparisons for gender, age, year in school, only-child status, and parents’ education.

Higher retrospective maltreatment scores were associated with more online aggression measured later: the standardized coefficient was 0.279. The model also found a small indirect association through subjective well-being, with an effect of 0.020 and a 95% confidence interval from 0.003 to 0.037, calculated from 5,000 bootstrap resamples. That pathway accounted for 6.69% of the total association; most of the statistical relationship was therefore not represented by the path that included well-being at the first wave.

The authors also asked whether difficulty describing feelings changed the strength of the direct link. A conventional linear model found a small interaction, with a standardized coefficient of 0.055 and an increase of 0.0036 in the proportion of explained variance. The signal, however, was no longer statistically significant when the team used robust standard errors, ordinal regression, or a binary classification of the outcome. The interaction was not consistent enough to support the idea of a clearly more vulnerable group.

The two-wave follow-up shows that reports of childhood adversity may identify a group with a higher later frequency of online aggression, while well-being accounts for only a modest fraction of that link. For universities, the finding favors prevention that treats psychosocial history, well-being, and digital behavior as different pieces of information. Guidance published by UNICEF USA on September 4—talk before sharing, preserve screenshots, block, and report abuse—offers practical steps, but those steps were not tested in the study and do not follow from its statistical model.