Glossary
DARVO.
DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. It is the three-move confrontational pattern used by perpetrators of psychological and sexual abuse when called to account. The acronym was coined by Jennifer Freyd, professor emerit of psychology at the University of Oregon, in 1997.
Audio readout.
The three moves
- Deny. Flat denial that the behavior happened. If incontrovertible evidence is present, denial shifts to denial of meaning — “that isn't what I meant,” “you're taking it out of context.”
- Attack. The person raising the concern is attacked — their character, their motives, their stability, their memory, their past. The original behavior recedes; the live argument is now about whether the complainer is a credible narrator.
- Reverse victim and offender. The roles are swapped. The person who raised the concern is now the abuser. The person whose behavior was being addressed is now the victim. The reversal often becomes the version of events told to outsiders afterward.
Why it works
DARVO works because it exploits the survivor's own conscience. Most people who attempt to address harm do so in good faith — they are open to the possibility of being partly wrong, of having misremembered, of having been unfair. DARVO weaponizes that openness. Freyd's empirical work (with Sarah Harsey and others) has also shown that DARVO can be effective on outside observers — judges, juries, mediators — particularly when the original behavior is hard to evidence and the perpetrator's emotional performance is convincing.
How to recognize it as it happens
The most useful tells are structural rather than verbal. The conversation began about a specific behavior. Within a few exchanges, the topic has changed. You are defending yourself against an accusation that wasn't on the table when you arrived. The original concern has not been addressed. You are about to apologize.
Recognizing the pattern in real time matters because arguing your way through it does not work; the conversation is structured to leave the original concern unaddressed. The functional response is to disengage, name the topic shift, decline to defend the inverted accusation, and revisit the original issue in writing — outside the dynamic of the live argument.
Where this appears on the site
The full treatment of DARVO, including Freyd's research bibliography, is at abuse/darvo.
