Growing up amid armed conflict: Women's attitudes toward domestic violence

This paper examines the relationship between growing up amid armed conflict and acceptance of violent behavior later in life. With this aim, we match data from 48 Demographic and Health Surveys in 23 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with records of all conflict events in the region post-WWII. Our empirical strategy exploits within-country variation in conflict exposure across survey clusters and over birth years. We find that attitudes toward domestic violence vary with past exposure to a high-intensity conflict (war) during childhood, but the estimated association is small in magnitude. Estimates from a model with survey cluster fixed effects show that acceptance of domestic violence by women exposed to war before age 20 is about three percent of a standard deviation higher than acceptance by women who live in the same community and experience a war later in life or were born after the war ended. The association is the largest for women first exposed to war early in childhood but remains small (five percent of a standard deviation).