A new study, published in the wake of controversy over sexual misconduct allegations against several Donald Trump Cabinet nominees, reveals a positive correlation between people accused of misconduct and those Darvo (“Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender”) using defensive tactics and both perpetrating sexual harassment and accepting rape myths.
“These findings suggest that Darvo is not just a response,” said Dr. Sarah Harsey, assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University-Cascades and lead author of the study. “It reflects a broader perspective that condones victim blaming and minimizes responsibility.”
The study, published Wednesday in PLOS One, included surveys of a group of 602 college students and another group of 325 “community members” — “regular people,” Harsey said, found through Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s crowdsourcing service.
Among college students, researchers found “a positive correlation between Darvo use and both perpetration of sexual harassment and acceptance of rape myths.” The community group showed “very strong correlations.”
Harsey’s co-authors were Alexis Adams-Clark, a doctoral student at the University of Oregon, and Jennifer Freyd, professor emeritus of psychology at Oregon and founder of the nonprofit Center for Institutional Courage.
Freyd coined the term Darvo in the 1990s. She said the idea came from watching “the hearings for Clarence Thomas and the response to Anita Hill,” the law professor who said in 1991 that the then-Supreme Court nominee sexually harassed her, and then seeing how her own reputation was damaged by the mud was dragged.
“Clarence Thomas had a leadership role” on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Freyd said. “So it seemed to me that if there was anyone who would have had a different reaction to the accusation, it was him. He is said to have said something like: ‘My memory is very different from yours. I find it disturbing to hear that you experienced things this way. I know these are very difficult conversations, and I want to understand what makes you say this.” But instead it was a mob that attacked him and the other people who enabled him Anita Hill… and then I saw it all.”
Introducing their study, Freyd and her co-authors write that they aimed to “expand research on the links between Darvo and sexual violence. We investigated whether people who use Darvo in response to confrontations that involve a range of abuses also exhibit behaviors and ascribe beliefs that contribute to sexual violence.
“Findings provide further confirmation of a link between Darvo and sexual violence and suggest that this defensive response is part of a larger worldview that justifies participation in sexual violence and blames victims,” she added.
The study is being released amid a new sexual misconduct scandal in Washington, involving not only the blizzard of accusations against Donald Trump himself, but also allegations against Trump’s first choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz; his choice for Secretary of Health, Robert F Kennedy Jr; and Pete Hegseth, the candidate for secretary of defense who was accused of sexual assault in 2017.
On Sunday, the New Yorker reported a lawyer’s use of Darvo: he insisted that Hegseth was “completely innocent” and that his accuser “was the aggressor,” had “tried to blackmail him” and had “previously filed a false rape charge filed against someone else. , undermining its credibility.” The lawyer also demanded the release of investigative data on Hegseth’s accuser. The New Yorker said it had asked authorities for such data, but found none existed.
Harsey said: “It is easy to find examples of Darvo in the context of sexual misconduct in the news these days. We started this project after Trump’s first presidency, and now we’re about to face a second. And so I think its relevance is quite noticeable right now.
“I hope that after reading the report people will have words for things they have already noticed. By naming Darvo, by knowing its associations with things like rape myth acceptance and sexual harassment perpetration…it allows people to take a step back and think, “Wait, this is Darvo. This is something that research has looked into.”
‘Maybe we don’t need to bring anything [those using Darvo are] I say this seriously because we know this is a common tactic. We know it’s related to other unwanted structures like this. Perhaps we don’t have to believe and endorse these statements when we see Darvo in the wild. ”
