WHO/Europe survey: more than two-thirds of young adults report childhood adversity, 1 in 5 report four or more

More than two in three young adults in Europe say they went through at least one adverse childhood experience, according to a report the World Health Organization's Regional Office for Europe released Tuesday, October 6.

More than one in five said they experienced four or more.

The survey covered more than 26,000 people aged 18 to 30 across the European Union, Iceland and Norway. Respondents were recruited through national panels, and data was collected between November 2025 and January 2026. WHO/Europe ran the survey with Liverpool John Moores University, whose researchers led the analysis. The European Commission paid for it.

What the survey measured

The study tracked nine forms of adversity, including physical, emotional and sexual abuse, physical neglect, household substance use, household mental illness, parental separation or death, and witnessing domestic violence.

The most common were parental separation or death, witnessing domestic violence, and emotional abuse.

The first category combines parental death with parental departure, two very different childhood events counted as one form of adversity. This definition contributes to the high headline number.

The report did not rank countries. WHO/Europe said it looked at patterns rather than comparing nations, so there is no country-by-country scoreboard.

The numbers on those hit hardest

Among respondents with four or more adverse experiences, 76.3% said they had needed professional mental health support in the previous year. Among those with none, the figure was 36.7%.

The four-plus group was also about 6 times more likely to report experiencing violence as a young adult and 10 times more likely to report perpetrating it. They were around 8 times more likely to report being cyberbullied in childhood.

Higher exposure was also associated with lower educational attainment, a greater chance of being out of education, employment or training, lower household income, lower trust in others and weaker connection to community. The four-plus group reported more physical pain, mobility problems and difficulty with daily activities such as work or study.

"When a child grows up around violence or a household in crisis, we shouldn't be surprised that it follows them into the classroom, job market and their relationships years later," said Dr Natasha Azzopardi-Muscat, WHO/Europe's director of health systems.

"We're not talking about a small, unlucky minority," she said. "This isn't a mental health issue in isolation. It's a social and economic one, and it needs every sector at the table, not just health services."

Limits of the data

This is a self-reported, retrospective survey. Adults looked back at their childhoods and described them, and they also judged for themselves whether they had needed mental health care. Both are subjective measures.

The report describes associations. Professor Mark Bellis, the study's academic lead at Liverpool John Moores, went further, saying adverse childhood experiences "are at the root of poorer health, social and economic outcomes among young adults across Europe." The report itself points to chronic early-life stress disrupting brain development and emotional regulation as the mechanism.

What a survey like this cannot separate is how much of the later hardship comes from the childhood event itself and how much from what travels with it: poverty, a parent's illness or addiction, or an unstable home that persists for years. WHO/Europe's own framing, which links the findings to social and economic drivers, points in that direction.

Bellis called it the first time childhood adversity has been measured in a comparable way across this many European countries.

The cycle problem

The authors warned that without prevention and early intervention, harmful experiences tend to repeat across generations. Adults who went through childhood adversity face higher risks of raising their own children amid financial stress, domestic violence and parental mental illness.

WHO/Europe is calling for a coordinated response. It wants adversity prevented at its source by supporting families and addressing drivers such as poverty, social exclusion and community violence. It also wants health and social services, schools and the justice system to identify affected children sooner and support them.

Bellis said adversity can be prevented and its impacts reduced.

The support gap

One finding cuts against the idea that the problem is simply unrecognized. The young people most exposed to harmful experiences were also more likely to say they had not received the mental health support they felt they needed, the report found.

WHO/Europe has not named a funding figure or a deadline for governments to act. Whether any national government adopts the recommendations will be visible in future budgets for family support and child protection services, where the report's call for multi-sector action has to turn into line items.