By Fred Fuller
DARVO is an acronym for: Deny. Attack. Reverse the Victim and Offender.
It is a manipulative method that some people use to defend themselves against criticism. Some researchers say it is a common strategy that is used by sexual offenders and psychological abusers.
The pattern it usually follows is this:
1. The wrongdoer denies that what they are accused of ever happened.
2. When confronted with evidence, the wrongdoer attacks the accuser.
3. The wrongdoer claims that the accuser was actually the wrongdoer, reversing the accusation to claim they were the victim and the accuser is to blame.
Do you know any people who use this tactic?
Do you know any politicians who use this tactic?
Psychologist Jennifer Freyd, at the University of Oregon, coined the acronym DARVO in a 1997 paper entitled “Violations of Power, Adaptive Blindness and Betrayal Trauma Theory,” which focused on sexual abusers. She wrote:
“I have observed that actual abusers threaten, bully and make a nightmare for anyone who holds them accountable or asks them to change their abusive behavior. This attack, intended to chill and terrify, typically includes threats of law suits, overt and covert attacks on the whistle-blower’s credibility, and so on. The attack will often take the form of focusing on ridiculing the person who attempts to hold the offender accountable. The attack will also likely focus on ad hominem or ad feminam instead of intellectual/evidential issues. Finally, I propose that the offender rapidly creates the impression that the abuser is the wronged one, while the victim or concerned observer is the offender. Figure and ground are completely reversed. The more the offender is held accountable, the more wronged the offender claims to be. The offender accuses those who hold him accountable of perpetrating acts of defamation, false accusations, smearing, etc. The offender is on the offense and the person attempting to hold the offender accountable is put on the defense. ‘Deny, Attack and Reverse Victim and Offender’ work best together.”
Freyd noted that DARVO is frequently very effective, although the number of people who are inclined to believe a DARVO response decreases once they understand the tactic.
Many academics have studied and codified the different methods that people use in arguments and debates. An “argumentum ad hominem” for instance, refers to several types of defenses where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument, rather than the substance of the argument itself. This avoids genuine debate by creating a diversion, often using a totally irrelevant, but highly charged attribute of the opponent’s character or background.
This is what’s known as a “fallacy” in the study of Logic. It doesn’t prove logically that the statement made is false, but it may still persuade the audience that they shouldn’t believe what was stated.
The defense tactic called “tu quoque” is a related fallacy in which a person who is criticized replies that the critic is hypocritical because they do the same thing. But that doesn’t mean the criticism was wrong.
“Whataboutism” is a term for a similar verbal defense technique that I hear being used a lot in our current political climate. A famous example from the past is how the Soviet Union would respond when the U.S. criticized its human rights abuses. The Soviets would say, “But what about the way the civil rights of Black people are denied in the U.S.?”
As a response to “whataboutisms” I often think of what I heard from adults when I was a child: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“Accusation in a mirror,” which is also called “mirror politics” or “mirror image propaganda,” is a technique often used in the context of hate speech incitement, where one falsely attributes one’s own motives and/or intentions to one’s adversaries. According to Wikipedia, “It has been cited, along with dehumanization, as one of the indirect or cloaked forms of incitement to genocide, which has contributed to the commission of genocide, for example in the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide. By invoking collective self-defense, accusation in a mirror is used to justify genocide, similar to self-defense as a defense for individual homicide.”
The term “accusation in a mirror” was used by an anonymous Rwandan propagandist when he instructed his colleagues to accuse their enemies of exactly what they themselves were planning to do.
Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s chief propagandist, is supposed to have said: “Accuse the other side of that of which you are guilty.” Whether or not he actually said it in those words, he used that strategy frequently.
In modern psychology, this is often referred to as “projection.” It involves projecting one’s own undesirable traits or behaviors onto others. Projection can be used as a defense mechanism, and it can also be an unconscious belief that these false characteristics of another person are true, while not recognizing that these are traits in oneself.
And then there’s the “Gish gallop” debating technique, somewhat unrelated to these other strategies, but still a way to avoid the truth in an argument. The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after American creationist Duane Gish, who frequently used the technique in debates. It involves confronting an opponent with a rapid-fire series of misleading arguments, misrepresentations, and outright lies that overwhelm the opponent and make it impossible to refute them all. It can make the opponent look weak in front of an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.
It’s good to be aware of some of these techniques for trying to obscure the truth so that you can avoid being deceived by them or even emotionally victimized by them. Knowing the tactics that people are using against you is one of the best ways to not be hoodwinked by them.
