ORIGINAL ARTICLE Exposure to Family Violence in Childhood and Intimate Partner Perpetration or Victimization in Adulthood: Exploring Intergenerational Transmission in Urban Thailand Kent R. Kerley & Xiaohe Xu & Bangon Sirisunyaluck & Joseph M. Alley Published online: 9 December 2009 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009 Abstract Investigators who study intimate partner violence have long recognized a relationship between exposure to violence in the family of origin and subsequent offending and victimization in the family context. This relationship holds not only for direct exposure (i.e., experiencing violence), but also for indirect exposure (i.e., witnessing violence against a parent or sibling). Typically, this relationship has been attributed to a social learning process that results in the intergenerational transmission of family violence. In this study, we explore intergenerational transmission in a sample of 816 married women in Bangkok, Thailand to determine how childhood exposure to violence in the family of origin is related to intimate partner perpetration and victimization during adulthood. Our results show that there are indeed long-term and significant effects of childhood exposure to family violence on the likelihood of Thai women’ s psychological and physical intimate partner perpetration. However, these effects appear to be indirect. Additionally, our results demonstrate a direct association between childhood exposure to parental intimate partner violence and subsequent psycho- logical and physical victimization in adulthood. Keywords Family violence . Intergenerational transmission of violence . Intimate partner perpetration . Intimate partner violence . Thailand Over the past few decades, a large body of research has demonstrated a consistent link between exposure to violence in the family of origin and subsequent family violence (e.g., intimate partner violence and child abuse) in adulthood. Despite the general trend in findings, there are many important variations in the intergenerational trans- mission of family violence based on factors such as gender, type of violence to which children are exposed (physical, sexual, or emotional), and whether childhood exposure leads to perpetration or victimization in adulthood (Kernsmith 2006; Mihalic and Elliott 1997). Using survey data collected from 816 married women residing in Bangkok, Thailand, this article contributes to the literature by: (a) studying an all- female sample in a cross-cultural context, (b) exploring a wide range of family violence variables in both childhood and adulthood, and (c) assessing whether childhood exposure to violence impacts both perpetration and victimization in the family context. Intimate partner violence (IPV), defined as psychological, physical, or sexual harm by a current or former partner or spouse (Saltzman et al. 1999), is evident in countries around the world. Cross-cultural studies have found that physical K. R. Kerley (*) Department of Justice Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 1201 University Boulevard, Suite 210, Birmingham, AL 35294, USA e-mail: krkerley@uab.edu X. Xu Department of Sociology, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA B. Sirisunyaluck Faculty of Liberal Arts, Maejo University, Nonghan, Sansai District, Thailand J. M. Alley Department of Justice Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA J Fam Viol (2010) 25:337–347 DOI 10.1007/s10896-009-9295-7