What Are the Mechanisms Underpinning Intergenerational Transmission of Violence Perpetration? A Realist Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Successive generations are more likely to carry out acts of violence in households where an individual has either perpetrated or been subjected to violence. While research to date has mostly concentrated on direct associations between violence experience or perpetration in generation 1 and violence perpetration in generation 2, there is limited evidence regarding the underlying mechanisms of the transmission of intergenerational violence perpetration. We conducted a realist review to adjudicate theories of the underlying mechanisms of intergenerational violence perpetration. Following Realist and Meta-Review Evidence Synthesis: Evolving Standards, we searched six databases across three phases considering all study designs. We identified 28 studies that were analyzed thematically. Included studies focused on perpetration of intimate partner violence, child abuse and neglect, youth violence, and violent crime. We identified five underlying mechanisms of intergenerational violence perpetration: (a) normalization of violence and harmful gender norms, (b) modeling and imitation, (c) emotion dysregulation, (d) high vulnerability, and (e) impaired relationships. These mechanisms operate and unfold differently across contexts where violence is experienced or witnessed. Our realist review highlights how violence perpetration may be transmitted across generations. We propose that interventions focused on norms and attitudes, mental health, social welfare, and parent-child relationships may be useful in preventing violence perpetration across generations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".