There is some empirical evidence to suggest that the women who saw their fathers physically abusing their mothers in their childhood are more likely to justify spousal violence as adults compared with the women who did not have the similar experience in their childhood. One expects that there is a psychological/social/economic mechanism which links the childhood experience of domestic violence of the girls and their attitudes towards domestic violence when these girls grow up to take up spousal role. I would be obliged if someone could answer this question.
i think you could havr a look in vistimisation. its critical criminology. liberal frminism and radical feminism.
If you think of violence towards women/mothers as a linguistic act, what is portrayed to the child is that women/mothers are of lesser value, that they are to be diminished, humiliated, degraded, punished and coercively controlled and that men have privileges and the right to exercise such punishment and control. If the world around this child reinforces this message through providing greater privileges to men both socially and politically then that child comes to understand the value of women as lesser than men and their punishment for gendered transgressions as the norm. Only when this normative world of male privilege is questioned and challenged, and the silence about such violence is broken thereby provided different messages about women's value and worth will the child be provided with positions in the world that are different from these denigrating gendered messages. You might like to read
Towns, A. J., & Adams, P. (2016). "I didn't know whether I was right or wrong or just bewildered." Ambiguity, responsibility, and silencing women's talk of men's domestic violence. Violence Against Women, 22(4), 496-520.
and
Heise, L. L., & Kotsadam, A. (2015). Cross-national and multilevel correlates of partner violence: an analysis of data from population-based surveys. Lancet Global Health, 3, e332-340.
The simple theoretical explanation will be social learning theory where the gist is how you behave depends on what you see in your surroundings.
The Social Learning Theory is appropriate because the theory assumed that people observe and model others' behaviours, attitudes, and emotional reactions, particularly those of significant others at home, school and community levels.
Thanks Peter M. Jansson , Alison J. Towns , Laila Iftikhar , Diksha Sapkota and Kola A Oyediran for your valuable answers to my question. I am particularly obliged to Peter M. Jansson and Alison J. Towns for their detailed exposition of the theoretical link between childhood experience of violence and subsequent attitudes to it as adults in later life.
I think childhood (individual related variables) contributed, while it is reinforced by the community and society related factors at large, and thus multi-factorial.
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