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Long-Term Effects of Childhood Exposure to War on Domestic Violence
Casale, D.
Casale, D.
Publication Date
2024-08
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© 2024 The Authors. Published by Palgrave MacMillan. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit:
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openAccess
Accepted for publication
2024-07-14
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Abstract
This paper highlights the scarring effects of early life exposure to civil war, by examining the impact of exposure to conflict in childhood on the incidence of domestic violence in adulthood among married women. To estimate these effects, we use a difference-in-differences model which exploits variation in exposure to Nigeria’s 30-month-long civil war by year of birth and ethnicity. Our results, based on the 2008 Nigerian Demographic Health Survey, show that women exposed to the war during childhood are more likely to be victims of domestic violence in adulthood compared to those not exposed to the war, with larger effects observed for those exposed at younger ages. Additionally, we explore the mechanisms through which exposure to civil war might affect domestic violence, and find some support for both the normalisation of violence and weakened bargaining power hypotheses. Understanding the root causes of domestic violence is important given the high prevalence in developing countries and the deleterious consequences for women and their children.
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Accepted manuscript
Citation
Ajefu JB and Casale D (2025) Long-Term Effects of Childhood Exposure to War on Domestic Violence. European Journal of Development Research. 37: 124–151
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Article