The Psychology of Victim Reversal
Catching the tricks that abusers use to convince their victims and the public that they’re the hurt ones.
Most people have seen it happen, if it hasn’t happened outright to them. When abusers are about to be exposed, they switch the script and rewrite the narrative to make themselves the hurt ones.
And the worst thing is, a lot of times, the public and even the victim begin to believe it.
The traditional example might be when the offender convinces the victim that they deserve the abuse somehow, and that it’s the victim’s fault that the abuser has to commit the offence.
This tendency is documented widely and known academically as DARVO, introduced by Dr. Jennifer Freyd in 1997: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. It’s classical, typical abuser behavior and patterns, but abusers consistently get away with it.
As a society, we hate to believe that bad things can happen to people who don’t deserve it — the dark side of the American dream, where people only ever get what they deserve — because that opens up the possibility that it could happen to…
