693 Violent behavior and its relationship with other health risk behaviors among Romanian adolescents in the digital era

<h3>Background</h3> The prevalence of different forms of peer violence among adolescents and the associated factors vary between different countries and regions and suffer variations during time. <h3>Objectives</h3> This study focuses on Romanian high school students and aims to assess the prevalence of different forms of interpersonal peer violence and self directed violence as well as their associations with different health risk behaviors. <h3>Methods</h3> A cross sectional study by means of anonymous questionnaires was performed in 2019 among 781 high-school students aged 15–19 from rural and urban areas situated in North-East Romania. <h3>Results</h3> Around one quarter of the high school students was a victim of a physical fight with a peer in the last three months, while 15% recognized they perpetrated physical fight among peers during the last 3 months. More than half of the participants declared that in the last 3 months they were aggressed verbally by peers at least once, while around one third of the participants said they have done so. In the same period of time one third of the high school students were excluded by peers at school and 43% excluded others. With regard to exposure to cyber-violence in the last 3 months, almost one third were victim of it and one out of 5 students were perpetrators of this form of violence. A percentage of 17% of the students declared that they had serious thought about suicide at least once during lifetime. There were several associations between different forms of violence as well as with other health risk behaviors such as tobacco and alcohol use and problematic use of social media. <h3>Conclusions</h3> Violence prevention and reduction efforts are needed for Romanian adolescents, including their integration in school based health education.