Domestic Violence
The stress and trauma inflicted by mandatory service often carry over into personal lives, escalating domestic violence. Soldiers, unable to cope with their own emotional scars, often become abusers once they return home.
ConscriptionFuels Domestic Abuse After Service
Men returning from military service are not the same people that entered the army. The byproduct of the mental changes the state forces men into are often felt the most by those closest to the individuals released from their army sentence. The men brutalized by conscription, seek outlets for violence and find one in domestic violence.
This can be seen best in the example of Argentina, where once it was possible to perfectly compare the population affected by conscription, and one free of its burden since a conscription lottery was in use. Studies there find a consistent rise in domestic violence, by those who went through the army forge of societal and mental attitudes.
Conscription causes men to adopt more sexist attitudes in dimensions such as justification of sexism and violence as well as sexual machismo. These sexist attitudes gained in the army then resurface in real-world behaviours. In the end result, conscription causes more engagement in intimate partner violence, both non-physical abuse and physical violence. The study suggests that conscription is a systemic source of misogynistic attitudes and violent behaviour.
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