When an influential person is called out for doing something terrible, whether that’s promoting harmful, hateful views, holding prejudiced beliefs, or abusing someone online or in real life, there’s a formula for what they have to do. First they have to issue an official statement, either owning up to or denying their wrongdoing and offering an explanation or an apology. Then they’ll need to gently rehabilitate their image so they can be officially un-cancelled.
But within that formula, there’s another formula – and that’s DARVO. DARVO is an acronym that describes the typical response of a guilty person when they’ve been accused of bad behaviour. It’s traditionally referred to in discussions of a perpetrator of sexual crimes, such as rape or physical abuse, but is a pattern that pops up in many other situations in which people are called out for something negative.
It stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.
Let’s break down those stages.
First you have Deny – that’s pretty self-explanatory. You’ll see the person accused of wrongdoing simply denying that that’s the case; ‘I do not hold those views’, ‘I never said that’, ‘I did not do that bad thing’. The Deny stage is where gaslighting starts to come into play, with the person often trying to simply deny someone else’s lived reality. ‘No, that doesn’t happen’, ‘no, you’re making that up’, or ‘that might have happened, but it’s not as bad as you say it is’.
Then there’s the Attack bit. This is when the accused person will turn around the criticism to focus blame on the person calling them out. So let’s say a celebrity was called out by someone on Twitter – they might go into attack mode by accusing that person of just being jealous, or bitter, or a liar.
Finally, you’ve got the Reverse Victim and Offender stage. This is where things get sneaky and subtle. Suddenly, the accused person will turn things around and say that actually, they’re not guilty of doing something terrible. In fact, they are the ones being treated poorly. In this stage, you might see someone introduce their own trauma as an excuse or a distraction tactic. They’ll respond to accusations of racism, for example, with a story about how they faced gender discrimination when they were younger. Or they might focus their statement on how they feel ‘bullied’ by the accusations, so those reading feel that the person who has been called out is actually the victim, facing online abuse rather than being challenged on their actions.
She created the term back in 1997, but often speaks and writes about DARVO in the context of the #MeToo movement. DARVO can be nestled into an apology or it can be a replacement for one. Its aim is to disarm the accusors and essentially prevent people from making further criticisms. It’s a clever trap when you think about it. Imagine all the stages together in this hypothetical.
Let’s say an influential person is accused of transphobia. They issue a response in which they deny that they are transphobic – ‘I love trans people! I have many trans friends!’ – then attack their critics – ‘people saying I’m transphobic are just cruel, hateful people who want to cause division’. Finally, they Reverse Victim and Offender: ‘I’m receiving so much online abuse because I’m a woman and we live in a sexist society’.
Now, as a critic, you’re stuck. If you continue to call that person out, you’re ‘cruel, hateful and want to cause division’. You’re being sexist. You’re piling on the online abuse. Clever, right? It silences other victims, too, showing them that if they speak up they’ll just have their experiences denied, be attacked, and be blamed.
The dangerous thing is that DARVO works. Research by Dr Freyd and her colleague, Sarah Harsey, found that exposure to a DARVO response was associated with less belief of the victim and more blame of the victim, meaning the response is successful for the perpetrators of abuse. It’s handy to know about DARVO, however, so you can see through the sneaky tactics and work out what’s really going on. Dr Freyd has said before that people are much less likely to believe and accept a DARVO response once they understand the mechanics of this commonly used technique – and her research backs it up. Knowledge is power, and the more people know about DARVO, the less effective it becomes.
