Events

Using administrative data from Sweden and the United States, this paper provides the first
large-scale estimates on the intergenerational transmission of violence against women (VAW)
and evidence on how this cycle can be broken. We show that sons of fathers suspected of
VAW are more than twice as likely to become suspected perpetrators of VAW, and daugh-
ters exposed to violent fathers are almost twice as likely to partner with VAW men. We
then examine whether removing fathers who commit VAW from the household weakens this
transmission. To address identification concerns, we use three complementary identification
strategies: a judge instrumental variables approach that exploits quasi-random variation in
father removal, a family-fixed effects model, and a comparison across stepfathers and non-
residing biological fathers. These three designs reveal that removing violent fathers signif-
icantly decreases sons’ later perpetration of VAW and daughters’ victimization risk, while
removing non-violent fathers increases sons’ later perpetration of VAW. Together, these re-
sults indicate that VAW is a learned behavior developed during childhood and that reducing
exposure to VAW fathers can meaningfully weaken its intergenerational persistence.