Purpose

We assess the association of men's exposure to violence in childhood--witnessing physical violence against one’s mother and being hit or beaten by a parent or adult relative--with their attitudes about intimate partner violence (IPV) against women. We explore whether men’s perpetration of IPV mediates this relationship and whether men’s attitudes about IPV mediate any relationship of exposure to violence in childhood with perpetration of IPV.

Methods

522 married men 18–51 years in Vietnam were interviewed. Multivariate regressions for ordinal and binary responses were estimated to assess these relationships.

Results

Compared to men experiencing neither form of violence in childhood, men experiencing either or both had higher adjusted odds of reporting more reasons to hit a wife (aORs, 95%CIs: 1.43, 1.03–2.00 and 1.66, 1.05–2.64, respectively). Men’s lifetime perpetration of IPV accounted fully for these associations. Compared to men experiencing neither form of violence in childhood, men experiencing either or both had higher adjusted odds of ever perpetrating IPV (aORs, 95%CIs: 3.28, 2.15–4.99 and 4.56, 2.90–7.17, respectively). Attitudes about IPV modestly attenuated these associations.

Conclusion

Addressing violence in childhood is needed to change men’s risk of perpetrating IPV and greater subsequent justification of it.