The Long-Term Relationship Between War and Attitudes Toward Domestic Violence: Evidence from Vietnam

• Examines the link between early-life war exposure and social norms on domestic violence. • Uses the Vietnam War (1965-1975) to study women’s attitudes toward intimate partner violence (IPV). • Greater bombing exposure at ages 0-19 is associated with higher acceptance of IPV in adulthood. • Exposure to Vietnam war in adolescence might have led to higher tolerance for IPV through its correlation with lower educational attainment. This paper examines the role of early exposure to war on contemporary social norms legitimizing domestic violence, utilising the Vietnam War over the period 1965-1975 as a case study. We employ a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits the district-level variation in bombing intensity and cohort-level variation in exposure at key developmental stages throughout childhood. The results suggest that women with higher exposure to bombing during utero to adolescence (ages 0-19) are more likely to justify intimate partner violence over three decades later. Our analysis of mechanisms suggests that lower educational attainment of women exposed to bombing likely drives this relationship. By documenting these long-term relationships in Vietnam, our study extends existing evidence concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa to a different historical and cultural setting, confirming the enduring legacies of war on the persistence of harmful gender norms.