April 2023 Courage in Action
On April 15 I flew to Louisville Kentucky so I could deliver a plenary address at the 40th annual meeting of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. My lecture was all about individual and institutional DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim & Offender), a tactic that can be used to deflect accountability when confronted with a wrongdoing.
In my plenary I described findings from several of our scientific articles about DARVO – much of it led by Courage Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Sarah Harsey – which points to this key finding: no matter what happened in the past in a disputed allegation, the use of DARVO in the present is associated with harm.
Freyd & Harsey at the ISSTD meeting in Kentucky
Recently, Dr. Harsey and I have asked the research question: what do we know about who uses DARVO? In the April issue of the Courage Brief, Dr. Harsey partially answered this question when she wrote about a newly completed project that revealed those who use DARVO are more likely to have personality traits of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.
Dr. Harsey and I will present more of our new research in June in Denver, Colorado at the conference of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. There we will share our striking discovery that DARVO use is strongly associated with believing rape myths and perpetrating sexual harassment.
In August at the American Psychological Association 2023 Convention in Washington, DC, we will present data that explore whether DARVO responses are associated with culpability.
Why are we traveling around the country to share these new DARVO findings? Our prior research indicates that education about DARVO helps reduce its harmful impact. We plan to research ways to prevent DARVO as well as to heal its wounds. In the meantime, we will keep spreading the word as education is a key step of institutional courage and a core mission of the Center for Institutional Courage.
Jennifer Joy Freyd, PhD
Founder and President
Center for Institutional Courage