Understanding why violence repeats across generations is one of the most consequential questions in public health — and whether that repetition follows different pathways for men and women has rarely been tested with rigorous modeling. This Japanese study adds important nuance, suggesting that the mechanisms linking childhood victimization to adult perpetration are not gender-neutral, with implications for how intervention programs are designed and targeted.
The study enrolled 483 parents in suburban Tokyo, using validated instruments — including the Family Poly-Victimization Screen, the Kessler 6, and the PCL-5 — to map pathways from childhood abuse and neglect (CAN) to adult intimate partner violence (IPV) and child maltreatment perpetration. For males, childhood physical abuse showed a direct association with adult IPV perpetration (β = .23), while psychological distress independently predicted both IPV victimization and CAN perpetration. For females, both psychological and physical childhood abuse were directly linked to adult CAN perpetration, and psychological distress appeared to play a mediating role — a contrast not observed in the male subsample. Psychological distress did not mediate intergenerational transmission in males across any pathway tested.
This is a cross-sectional, self-reported, single-region study — limitations that substantially constrain causal inference. The sample of 483, while usable for structural equation modeling, limits statistical power for the multiple-group comparisons at the heart of the analysis. Critically, the Tokyo suburban population may not generalize to other cultural contexts where family violence dynamics, help-seeking norms, and gender role expectations differ markedly. That said, the finding that psychological distress functions as a mediator for women but not men aligns with a broader literature suggesting women's trauma responses more frequently present through internalizing pathways, while men's manifest as externalizing behaviors. This is an incremental but directionally meaningful contribution — suggesting trauma-informed violence prevention programs may benefit from gender-differentiated designs rather than uniform approaches.
