Content warning: sexual abuse, death, men's violence, carceral violence
Grace Tame, 2021’s Australian of the Year, recently gave visibility to the acronym "DARVO" on Twitter (see thread link below).
Deny | Attack | Reverse Victim and Offender
It’s a common psychological strategy employed by people accused of sexual abuse to turn the tables on their accusers. The victim becomes the one in the wrong for speaking out and ruining a reputation.
But as Grace recognised, DARVO has a far broader application too. It can help shift almost any unfortunate narrative. Called out for racism? Condemn the critique as an unfair pile-on. Labelled a rape apologist? Threaten defamation action.
Defensiveness is one of humankind’s least endearing but most enduring traits. So it’s hardly surprising that DARVO is the go-to response for many facing public censure, even in cases where a simple apology might have quelled the growing social media storm.
More surprising – but just as worrying – is how our language often buys into the DARVO model. The simplest turn of phrase can protect the offender and put the weight of responsibility on the person they have harmed. We are used to seeing headlines such as:
49 killed in mosque shooting
Woman allegedly raped at gunpoint
Passive phrasing focuses on a horror verb (killed, raped) and its object (49 worshippers, a woman). But the subject (the killer, the rapist) is nowhere to be found. And the implicit message to victims – after hundreds of similar headlines – is that offenders are rarely accountable for their actions.
Back in 2015, journalist Jane Gilmore edited a screenshot of one such headline and posted her version online. The Fixed It project was born, and it found so much support it later became a book about how the media represents gendered violence.
Following Jane’s approach, we can see it doesn’t take much to shift the focus:
Terrorist kills 49 in mosque shooting
Man allegedly rapes woman at gunpoint
Of course, her analysis also reminds us that it’s not just headlines from the media: our everyday language can fall into the same traps.
For activists across the social justice movements, changing the language society uses is a key step in changing attitudes and behaviours. Overt slurs receive a lot of attention for the damage they cause, but what about the sneakier passive terms that are equally entrenched?
Feminists have already made inroads in renaming “violence against women” as “men’s violence against women”. It's now understood that those men who choose to inflict violence should be as prominent in the conversation as the women they victimise.
In a similar vein, abolitionist Tabitha Lean has argued against “deaths in custody”, a general tag that overwhelmingly relates to First Nations people. To her, the phrase “almost puts the onus of the death on the person who has died and … it alleviates responsibility and blame from the carceral state” (see thread link below). Would wording such as “Aboriginal people killed in custody” better describe the preventable deaths caused by interaction with the prison system?
Linguistic changes like these tend to feel uncomfortable at first, because they shine a light on injustices that still benefit many of us. They can certainly raise the ire of strangers on the internet. But just as we are learning to push back against racist, ableist or misogynistic slurs, it must be time to address the DARVO-esque redistribution of responsibility in common phrases.
The old adage says that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me". We know as individuals it's not true. And the same goes for our wider society, where language can do great harm by upholding systems that thrive on the imbalance of power.
The good news is that when we get the words right, they can also help us undermine those systems and support our efforts to reshape society.
So one day, a female rape survivor might not be subjected to questions about what she was wearing. One day, a Black man’s death in the back of a police van might not be explained away as something he brought on himself. And one day, these crimes might not happen at all.
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