We investigated the potential relationship between the exposure tocivil war violence and the incidence of domestic violence (DV), definedas physical and/or sexual abuse of women from their husbands or part-ners. We found that exposure to civil war violence, especially during thewoman's early life, increases the probability for her to be a victim of DV,even after controlling for the woman and her partner's characteristics (in-cluding the violence that the woman observed at home when she was achild) and controlling for province of residence and cohort fixed effects.Our results suggest that at least part of the effect of civil war violence onDV is through a preferences mechanism. In fact, we found that womenwho were more exposed to civil war violence, especially in their earlyteenage years, are more likely to report when they are adults that it isjustified that men beat women for various reasons. Moreover, we foundthat exposure to civil war violence does not only increases the probabilityof being subject of DV, but also reduces the average time after marriage(or union) that domestic violence starts occurring (for those women thatreported being victims). Again, the evidence suggests that exposure tocivil war violence during early teenage years has the biggest impact on thiseffect. One of the implications of these results is that civil war conflictsmay have long lasting effects on increasing the level of domestic violencein the society, not only for generations that were exposed to those conflictsbut for future generations as wel