Between 28-31% of youth experience violence in their families (Sinha, 2012). Further, almost 28% of adolescents in the US-National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health reported physical abuse by caregivers during childhood (Hussey, Chang, & Kotch, 2006). Exposure to violence in the family may well be the most common form of abuse affecting violence and depression rates of secondary school students that we know. This kind of exposure is deeply implicated in multiple secondary school problems, including poor physical and mental health, addiction, poor academic outcomes, and problematic school behavioral issues (Artz, Jackson, Rossiter. Nijdam-Jones, Geczy & Porteous, 2014). This study analyses data generated by a cross-sectional study involving a random sample of 5149 middle-school students with a mean age of 14.5 years from four EU-countries (Austria, Germany, Slovenia, and Spain), in which every fourth respondent (23.0%) had been physically abused by his or her parents and almost every sixth respondent (17.3%) had witnessed physical spousal abuse. Contrary to expectations, some of these youths reported no engagement in peer violence and no symptoms of depression, which meant that they could be considered “resilient.” Given their precarious conditions, we inquired into how these young people functioned on other protective and risk indicators when compared to non-violence exposed peers. Using Bonferroni post-hoc tests, we conducted an analysis of variance based comparison of levels of risk and protective factors on three groups of violence and depression-resilient youth (low, middle and high family violence experience) with those participants who reported no family violence or abuse, no depression and no use of violence. Violence and depression resilient participants reported significantly higher levels of aggression supportive beliefs, alcohol consumption, drug use, verbal aggression towards and from teachers and use of indirect aggression, along with lower levels of social and personal protective characteristics such as self acceptance, emotional self-control, optimism about the future, and positive relations with parents and teachers, than students without family violence experiences. Resilience is not an on-off characteristic. As our results showed: The higher the experienced level of violence family was, the higher the risk factors and the lower the protective factors of the resilient students were. Our results indicate that a positive resilience status is not a sufficient indicator for a positive social and personal development. Resilient students showed significant higher levels of social and personal risks and lower levels of social and personal protective characteristics than students without family violence experiences.

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