Attitudes and Alcohol Use: Exploring the Pathways From Childhood Violence Exposure to College Dating Violence Perpetration

Objective: This study examined pathways from childhood experiences of violence (i.e., physically and sexually violent victimization and experiences with parental intimate partner violence) to dating violence perpetration through attitudes toward violence and alcohol use among U.S. college students. Method: We used a subset of heterosexual U.S. college students (N = 3,375) collected by convenience sampling from the cross-sectional International Dating Violence Study (2001-2006), which included measures of childhood and dating violence, alcohol use, and attitudes toward violence. Structural equation modeling was used with appropriate estimation methods for nonnormal, ordinal, and clustered data. Results: The full model demonstrated acceptable fit (CFI = 0.950; TLI = 0.946; RMSEA = 0.034), accounting for 17% of the variation in dating violence perpetration. We found a significant indirect effect from experiences of childhood physical violence to dating violence perpetration via attitudes toward violence and two significant indirect effects from experiences of childhood sexual violence to dating violence perpetration via attitudes toward violence and alcohol use. Conclusion: Findings underscore how attitudes toward violence may be important targets for dating violence prevention programs and suggest that perpetration prevention programs should integrate trauma-informed approaches that are sensitive to college students' histories of childhood violent victimization.