This paper examines the long-term determinants of intimate partner violence (IPV) by analyzing its relationship with traditional family structures: stem families in which one child stays in the parental household and nuclear families in which all children leave the household upon marriage. My hypothesis is that coresidence with a mother-in-law increases a wife's contribution to nondomestic work, which may decrease the level of violence. I find that areas where stem families were socially predominant in the past currently have a lower IPV rate, and use differences in inheritance laws in medieval times as an instrument for the different family types.

This article examines the relationship between ethnic-based gender norms and conflict-related sexual violence. We generate a novel dyadic data set that contains information on the ethnic identity of all the actors involved in ethnic civil conflicts around the world between 1989 and 2019 and their use of sexual violence. We exploit ethnographic information to construct a new male dominance index at the ethnicity level that captures deep-rooted gender norms. First, we find that male-dominant armed actors are more likely to be perpetrators of sexual violence. Second, we consider the cultural distance in gender norms between the combatants and show that sexual violence is driven by a specific clash of conceptions on the appropriate role of men and women in society: sexual violence increases when the perpetrator is more male dominant than the victim. Additional analyses suggest that gender norms influence both the strategic use of sexual violence for military purposes and the expressive use of sexual violence for private motivations. These patterns are specific to sexual violence and do not explain general violence in a conflict. Differences in other cultural dimensions unrelated to gender are not associated with conflict-related sexual violence.