A reader of the blog provides a new acronym and defines it: DARVO. We have seen examples of this on many recent occasions.
“DARVO”
DARVO is an acronym to describe a common strategy of abusers: Deny the abuse, then Attack the victim for attempting to make them accountable for their offense, thereby Reversing Victim and Offender. This may involve gaslighting and victim blaming.
“Psychologist Jennifer Freyd writes:
“I have observed that actual abusers threaten, bully and make a nightmare for anyone who holds them accountable or asks them to change their abusive behavior. This attack, intended to chill and terrify, typically includes threats of law suits, overt and covert attacks on the whistle-blower’s credibility, and so on. The attack will often take the form of focusing on ridiculing the person who attempts to hold the offender accountable. The offender rapidly creates the impression that the abuser is the wronged one, while the victim or concerned observer is the offender. Figure and ground are completely reversed. The offender is on the offense and the person attempting to hold the offender accountable is put on the defense.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Seems like a good name (darvo was a nickname/street name of darvocet way back when) considering:
“Nov. 19, 2010 — The FDA has at last banned Darvon, Darvocet, and other brand/generic drugs containing propoxyphene — a safety-plagued painkiller from the 1950s. . . .”The drug puts patients at risk of abnormal or even fatal heart rhythm abnormalities,” John Jenkins, MD, director of the FDA’s office of new drugs at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said at a news conference. “Combined with prior safety data, this altered our risk assessment.”
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Diane,
Thanks for this post. DARVO is right.
And one more thing: HOW is YOUR KNEE and HEALTH? Please let us know how you are doing. We CARE about YOU.
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Dear Yvonne,
I am walking again. I will always have scar tissue. I can’t run for a bus. I walk slowly. I watch where I am going. And I hold the handrail.
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Reblogged this on Orton-Gillingham Tutoring and commented:
It happens all the time. Little did I know there was a name for it.
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“The best offense is a good defense” comes to mind although I have always thought of that adage as positive advice rather than an attack strategy.
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Students often use this technique, especially if they have been caught breaking the rules. Sometimes this is so effective that the teacher begins to doubt what they actually saw with their own eyes.
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An existing term for this is “victim bully”
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I’m glad to know there is a name for this. You see it at all levels, from playground to politics. Sadly, some people, including kids, are really good at it.
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What’s new is the prevalence of these tactics in education. It appears to be condoned to a large degree by many through the implicit and explicit nature of policy and leadership from the top down. There’s a great deal of brute force and rigging rather than a reliance on research, reason and collaboration. It’s truly tragic and reprehensible, as bad as outright crime.
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I have to laugh when I read about the anti-bullying curriculums being pushed in public elementary schools by state actors, when in fact, the biggest bullies are our state actors. Our business leaders and the pocket politicians that they fund are the biggest bullies on the block.
Let’s be honest for a change. Bullying is highly respected in business and in politics!
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Blaming The Victim (BTV) is a psychological and political dynamic that arises from the combination of two main forces:
Cognitive Dissonance. We have people who imagine themselves to be powerful members of power elites, but they are in reality too cowardly and craven to speak the truth to power.
Displacement. The above people need to blame poverty and the state of the economy on somebody, but they cannot face the truth about who is really screwing everybody, so they resort to blaming it on the poor, who have the least control over anything.
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It also serves to make one feel safe. If the poor have only themselves to blame, then I don’t need to worry about being poor because I’m not like “those people”. I don’t have their “culture” and I don’t make their “poor choices”.
I had kind of a rude awakening to this phenomenon when one of my colleagues got raped. She was getting out of her car, parked directly in front of the building, about 8:00 in the evening still dressed in her stinky sweats after working out when a guy forced her back in her car, made her drive around and then assaulted her. After the incident I found myself getting really mad at every little thing, but I eventually realized, with no small degree of horror, that I was actually mad at her. Eventually I figured out that I was mad because there was nothing I could blame her for. If she’d done something “wrong”, then I could have magnanimously “forgiven” her all while breathing a sigh of relief, because, of course I’d never do anything that stupid. But since she didn’t do anything “wrong”, there was no reason, other than sheer blind chance, that it was her and not me. We scared little humans tend to react to fear with anger.
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Jon Awbrey: yes.
Dienne: yes.
I thank you both for saying what needs to be said, however unpleasant or uncomfortable it may be for some folks.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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BRAVO
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Sorry – should have been:
BRAVO for DARVO! Now folks are seeing the abuse and identifying it for what it is.
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As someone who grew up around sociopathic family members who would automatically claim victimhood when you tried to defend yourself against their transgressions, this all rings true.
The education system the so-called reformers are crafting is fundamentally sociopathic, so it’s no wonder this psychological projection is typical. For example, people who criticize TFA for the well-documented inadequacy of its training, for it’s authoritarian and condescending treatment of students, and of its prostitution to billionaire so-called education reformers, are frequently called “haters” by its apologists, all while TFA and it’s alumni are up their eyeballs in public school closings, making teacher’s lives hellish, scheming to eliminate pensions for future teachers and strip the assets of those with them. Yet the people who raise their voices against this thuggish behavior are accused of being “uncivil.”
Who’s really behaving uncivilly here?
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The concept is not only in education.
A recent documentary on President Reagan showed how he lied about selling arms to Iran – the entire Iran Contra deal. It was an impeachable offense and he knew i t. BUT he let Oliver North take the heat, blame, shifted the media’s attention to that which otherwise would have landed him in deep doo doo.
This is the way that too many politicians and corporations work. Focus attention on something other than the real underlying problem, distract, obfuscate, mislead, shout out half truths or lies loud and long enough and people will believe that which those who wish to feather their own nest wish.
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Additionally, Reagan in this episode was among the first, to my knowledge, to use the passive voice, accept-no-responsibility weasel words: “Mistakes were made.”
But perhaps we should give our Alzheimer’s President some credit, since the so-called reformers cannot bring themselves to even admit that. No matter the destruction they leave in their wake, they never make mistakes and nothing is ever their fault.
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