Applies to employment in the United States. Covers a psychological term and its limits, not a legal test.
Not legal advice. The rules change from state to state, and federal courts do not all read them the same way. No page can cover your own facts, so if a deadline or a decision is close, talk to an employment lawyer where you live.
DARVO stands for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. It describes how some people react to being confronted. What does not exist is a workplace study: as of 3 September 2026 no published research measures DARVO at work, so no figure for how common it is at work has a study behind it.
Key takeaways
- The six published DARVO studies sampled other settings, such as dating-violence scenarios and campus sexual assault. As of 3 September 2026, no published study measures DARVO at work.
- Any workplace figure for DARVO has no study behind it. The questionnaires list work as one example, but no study has reported those answers as a workplace result.
- Jennifer J. Freyd, who coined the term, says DARVO may raise red flags but cannot be taken as proof of what someone did.
- Institutional betrayal has workplace data. Of 317 US online-panel workers who faced sexual harassment at work, 54.64% said they had experienced institutional betrayal at least once (2023 study).
- DARVO has no legal status in the United States. Being punished for opposing a practice Title VII makes unlawful can be retaliation under 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-3(a).
The pattern itself has been measured six times, all in other settings. The gap matters because the term now appears in workplace commentary, and in at least one peer-reviewed policy paper, that the research does not cover. Knowing which parts are measured and which are borrowed is what lets you use it without overstating your own case.
What is DARVO, and who named it?
Jennifer J. Freyd, Professor Emerit of Psychology at the University of Oregon, coined the term. Her own definition, from the page she maintains:
DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim — or the whistle blower — into an alleged offender.
Jennifer J. Freyd, What is DARVO?, read 3 September 2026
The term first appeared in print in a 1997 paper on betrayal trauma theory, in Feminism & Psychology 7, pages 22-32. Freyd also names a version that applies to organizations rather than people: “Institutional DARVO occurs when the DARVO is committed by an institution (or with institutional complicity)”. Gaslighting is a different pattern: a fight over what was said or agreed. See what workplace gaslighting is, and whether it is illegal.
Nothing so far is about work.
It also sets the scope. DARVO describes a reaction to a complaint rather than the mistreatment that prompted it: workplace mobbing is the group dynamic, a toxic boss is the person, and DARVO is the reaction.
What do the DARVO studies actually cover?
Freyd’s own page lists six peer-reviewed DARVO studies. Here is what each one sampled.
Two of those deserve a note. The 2020 experiments measured how observers judged an account of dating violence when the accused responded with DARVO. Participants shown a DARVO response “perceived the victim to be less believable, more responsible for the violence, and more abusive”. Those were students judging a written scenario, not workers judging a colleague.
Harsey, Adams-Clark and Freyd 2024 is worth reading for a different reason. It reports the same correlation twice in two samples and gets very different answers: DARVO scores against self-reported harassment perpetration came out at r = .128 in 602 undergraduates and r = .650 in 335 community adults. The two coefficients are far apart, and that is a good reason not to treat any single DARVO correlation as settled.
Only the abstract of the 2017 study is public. The earliest of the six papers sits behind a paywall. Its sample size appears in the chart above and in the sources; no findings or effect sizes from it appear anywhere on this page.
Why is there no workplace figure for DARVO?
As of 3 September 2026, no published study measures DARVO in a workplace or organizational setting.
That is easy to assert and hard to prove, so here is what the record shows. The DARVO questionnaires themselves name work.
The instructions on the short-form instrument read: “Please think of a time when you confronted someone who wronged you in some way. Some examples of being wronged include being cheated on in a relationship, being betrayed by a friend or family member, or being mistreated at your workplace.”
The relationship question that follows offers “Employer or boss” and “Coworker or other peer” among its options (University of Oregon, DARVO measures).
So the data has been collected in a form that could answer the workplace question. It has never been published that way.
The newest paper has eight categories and none of them is work. Durland, Harsey and Freyd 2026 reports what kind of confrontation each participant described: physical attack, forced sexual contact, emotional or psychological mistreatment, relationship conflict, being excluded or ignored by family or a friend, a secret exposed, disrespect by family or a friend, and disrespect by an acquaintance. The words “employer” and “workplace” appear nowhere in that paper.
Any percentage of workers said to experience DARVO comes from no published study. There is nothing to borrow, either: a figure lifted from a campus or dating sample describes a different population and says nothing about a workplace.
Who has applied DARVO to work in print?
As of 3 September 2026 the applications located in print are one named commentator and one peer-reviewed paper borrowing it at second hand. David Yamada is a tenured Professor of Law and Director of the New Workplace Institute at Suffolk University Law School, and the author of the model Healthy Workplace Bill. In a 2019 post on his blog he wrote:
Although I was vaguely familiar with DARVO from discussions about sexual and domestic abuse, I hadn’t associated it with workplace bullying. But it certainly fits: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender is exactly what happens when workplace bullies paint themselves as victims rather than as abusers.
David C. Yamada, Minding the Workplace, 7 March 2019
That is one law professor’s blog post. He applies an existing idea to a new setting. It is not a study, and Yamada does not present it as one. Where US law reaches workplace bullying covers the statutory side of the same territory.
Watch how a soft claim becomes a hard one. A 2026 paper on university anti-harassment policy, “The Master’s Tools”, describes DARVO as “a phenomenon well documented in the bullying and harassment literature”. Its citations for that include Rosenthal & Freyd’s study of 89 college women and Yamada’s blog post. A blog post is a reasonable thing to cite as commentary. It does not make a phenomenon well documented, and repeating that sentence would pass the overstatement along.
Does DARVO prove anything about what happened?
No, and the person who named it says so in writing. Read this before you put the word in anything you send.
Importantly, the use of DARVO, even if statistically associated with guilt, might raise red flags but cannot be considered proof of any particular past action. A person innocent of an accusation regarding past behavior might resort to a DARVO defense (although it is never a necessary response).
Freyd, What is DARVO?, under “DARVO is Not Proof of Past Behavior”
On the same page Freyd describes the state of her own field plainly: “The systematic empirical research testing the coherence or frequency of DARVO is now emerging… More research is needed.”
The practical version. A reversal is a thing that happened in a room, and it can be recorded like any other thing that happened in a room. It is not a finding about the original conduct, and presenting it as one goes further than the research does, and further than Freyd’s own disclaimer.
What is institutional betrayal, and why does it have workplace data when DARVO does not?
Freyd has a second term that does have workplace data behind it. Institutional betrayal means “wrongdoings perpetrated by an institution upon individuals dependent on that institution, including failure to prevent or respond supportively to wrongdoings by individuals… committed within the context of the institution” (University of Oregon). Its opposite is institutional courage.
Those two have been measured at work. Smidt, Adams-Clark and Freyd surveyed US adults employed full-time for at least six months, and analyzed the 317 who reported at least one instance of workplace sexual harassment. Of that group, 54.64% reported at least one experience of institutional betrayal and 76.17% reported at least one experience of institutional courage (PLoS ONE 18(1): e0278830, 25 January 2023).
Read those figures with the method attached. The sample came from a paid online panel rather than a probability sample, and the paper says so. It describes the people who answered, not the country.
The reason this matters for your situation: institutional betrayal is about what the organization does after you report, which is the part you can document, and the part that can amount to retaliation if it followed a protected complaint. DARVO describes one person’s behavior in one meeting. If you are choosing what to write down, write down the organization’s response.
DARVO and institutional betrayal differ in what each describes and in what has been measured.
| Point | DARVO | Institutional betrayal |
|---|---|---|
| What it describes | One person’s reaction to being confronted, in one meeting | What the organization does after you report |
| Who named it | Jennifer J. Freyd | Jennifer J. Freyd |
| Workplace data | No published study as of 3 September 2026 | A 2023 study of 317 US workers from a paid online panel who had faced sexual harassment at work |
| Main workplace figure | None | 54.64% reported at least one experience of institutional betrayal |
| Where the law comes in | No legal status in the United States. What it leads to can be retaliation. | It can amount to retaliation if it followed a protected complaint |
| What to write down | What was said, as close to word for word as you can | What the organization did afterwards, and when |
What does a DARVO response sound like?
The DARVO questionnaires are published in full, and they are the closest thing to a checkable list of what the pattern looks like in speech. These are statements a respondent is asked to rate, taken from the long-form and short-form instruments:
Statements from the published DARVO questionnaires
Deny "That never happened" "You're remembering it incorrectly" "Whatever you're saying happened isn't my fault" Attack "You're just trying to make me look bad" "You're a liar" "You need help" "No one would believe you if you said anything about it" Reverse victim and offender "You regret what you did and now you're blaming me" "I can't believe you're trying to make this my fault" "I'm the real victim here"
What to notice: the instrument names three components, and reversal is the one Freyd defines as turning the true victim into an alleged offender. That is the component that can put your own conduct in question rather than theirs. Source: the DARVO-LF and DARVO-SF instruments, University of Oregon.
The wording above is a research instrument, not a diagnosis and not a legal test. It is a list of things people report hearing, which makes it useful for writing down what was actually said.
What law applies when a complaint is turned back on you?
DARVO has no legal status in the United States. As of 3 September 2026 the term appears in no federal statute, in no EEOC guidance and in no NLRB guidance. Searching for it is not how you find your remedy.
What the law reaches is what the reversal leads to. If you opposed a practice Title VII makes unlawful, or took part in a charge or investigation, and you were punished for it, that is retaliation under 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-3(a).
You do not have to have been right. Under the EEOC’s 2016 retaliation guidance, opposition is protected where it rests on a reasonable, good-faith belief that the conduct violated the EEO laws. How to prove workplace retaliation sets out what that takes, and how to file an EEOC complaint sets out the sequence and the clocks.
The EEOC’s 2016 Select Task Force report lists five reasons employees give for not reporting: they anticipate and fear “disbelief of their claim; inaction on their claim; receipt of blame for causing the offending actions; social retaliation (including humiliation and ostracism); and professional retaliation, such as damage to their career and reputation” (EEOC Select Task Force, June 2016, read 3 September 2026). For being frozen out at work, see workplace ostracism, and when it becomes illegal.
Two of those five, disbelief and blame, name the same outcomes the 2020 dating-violence experiments measured. Setting them side by side is fair. Treating either as proof of the other is not, and the 2020 samples were students judging a vignette, not workers judging a colleague.
Check the date on the harassment guidance. The EEOC’s 2024 harassment guidance was rescinded on 22 January 2026 by a 2-1 vote, and its URL now returns a page-not-found. Cite the newsroom release of 23 January 2026 instead. The separate 2016 retaliation guidance remains in force as of 3 September 2026.
Check who the 75% retaliation figure actually surveyed. The EEOC’s 2016 report cites Cortina and Magley’s 2003 survey of 1,167 public-sector employees for the finding that 75% of those who spoke out about workplace mistreatment faced some form of retaliation. That study is about interpersonal mistreatment generally rather than sexual harassment, it is public sector, and it is from 2003. Do not shorten it to “three in four complainants face retaliation.”
How do you put a reversal on the record?
Write the sequence, not the label. A note that says what was said and when is usable by a lawyer, an investigator or an agency. A note that says “he DARVO’d me” is not, because it asks the reader to accept your conclusion before they have seen anything.
What the note should contain
Date and time: Present: What I raised, in one sentence: What was said back, as close to verbatim as I can manage: 1. 2. 3. What changed afterwards, and when: - schedule / duties / access - who stopped speaking to me - anything put in writing about me Anyone who saw or heard it: Where this note is stored:
What to notice: the third block is the one that carries weight later. A reversal in a meeting is contested; a change to your duties in the week after it is documented by the employer’s own systems, and the two together make a sequence.
Do not assume anyone else will keep a record for you. In Corbett, Warner, Harsey and Freyd’s 2026 interviews with 30 US workers who had experienced sexual harassment at work, “just under half (13/30, or 43%) of respondents never reported the incident(s) to anyone at their organizations”.
That is thirty people in one metropolitan area, and the authors say their data “do not provide a statistically generalizable account”. Still, the employer’s file may hold nothing at all.
Keep the record outside the employer’s systems and write it the same day. How to document workplace mistreatment so it holds up covers the method, and your rights in an HR investigation covers what the meeting itself can require of you.
What should you do this week?
In order:
- Write down what was actually said, today. Verbatim beats accurate-in-substance, and both beat a summary written a month later.
- Drop the label from anything you send. Describe the behavior. Let whoever reads it reach the conclusion themselves.
- Log what changed after the meeting, not just what happened in it. That is the part with independent records behind it.
- Work out whether your original complaint was protected. Opposition is covered if you reasonably believed the practice was unlawful, even if it turns out it was not.
- Count the deadline on the underlying complaint. Being disbelieved does not extend it, and the EEOC filing window runs from the discriminatory act, not from the end of an internal process.
Common questions about DARVO in the workplace
Is there a study of DARVO in the workplace?
None was located as of 3 September 2026. The six peer-reviewed DARVO studies sample general confrontations, dating-violence vignettes, campus sexual assault, and lifetime harassment perpetration. There is no workplace prevalence figure and no workplace effect size. Any percentage of workers said to experience DARVO comes from no published study.
Does someone using DARVO prove they did what you accused them of?
No, and Freyd says so herself. On her own page she writes that DARVO “might raise red flags but cannot be considered proof of any particular past action”, and that “a person innocent of an accusation regarding past behavior might resort to a DARVO defense”. Treat a reversal as something to record, not as evidence of the original conduct.
Is DARVO illegal in the United States?
DARVO is a term from psychology, not a legal category. As of 3 September 2026 it appears in no federal statute and in no EEOC or NLRB guidance. What can be unlawful is what the reversal leads to: if you opposed a practice you reasonably believed Title VII makes unlawful and were punished for it, that is retaliation under 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-3(a), whatever anyone called the behavior.
What should you write down when a complaint gets turned back on you?
The date, who was present, the words used as close to verbatim as you can manage, and what changed afterwards. Record the sequence rather than your conclusion about it. A note saying “he denied it, then said I was the one creating a hostile atmosphere, then HR asked me about my own conduct” is usable. A note saying “he DARVO’d me” is not.
Sources
- Jennifer J. Freyd, “What is DARVO?”: the definition, the disclaimers and the history of the term
- Freyd, J.J. (1997), “II. Violations of Power, Adaptive Blindness and Betrayal Trauma Theory”, Feminism & Psychology 7(1), 22-32: the first published use of DARVO
- Harsey, Zurbriggen & Freyd (2017), “Perpetrator Responses to Victim Confrontation: DARVO and Victim Self-Blame”, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 26, 644-663: n=138 undergraduates
- Harsey & Freyd (2020), “DARVO: What Is the Influence on Perceived Perpetrator and Victim Credibility?”: two dating-violence vignette experiments, n=316 and n=360
- Rosenthal & Freyd (2022), “From DARVO to Distress: College women’s contact with their perpetrators after sexual assault”, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 31, 459-477: 89 women
- Harsey & Freyd (2023), “The Influence of Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender and Insincere Apologies on Perceptions of Sexual Assault”, Journal of Interpersonal Violence 38(17-18), 9985-10008
- Harsey, Adams-Clark & Freyd (2024), “Associations between defensive victim-blaming responses (DARVO), rape myth acceptance, and sexual harassment”, PLOS ONE 19(12): e0313642
- Durland, Harsey & Freyd (2026), “Assessing Perpetrator Responses to Confrontation: Associations with a DARVO-SF and Post-trauma Symptoms in Two Different Populations”, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 27, 221-237: n=319 Prolific adults and n=261 students
- “The Master’s Tools: Anti-Bullying and Harassment Policy in Higher Education Institutions”, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 26 May 2026
- University of Oregon, DARVO measures index: the DARVO-LF, DARVO-SF and DARVO-USE questionnaires, with their prompts and items
- Smidt, Adams-Clark & Freyd (2023), “Institutional courage buffers against institutional betrayal, protects employee health, and fosters organizational commitment following workplace sexual harassment”, PLoS ONE 18(1): e0278830: n=317 US workers reporting workplace sexual harassment
- Corbett, Warner, Harsey & Freyd (2026), “Sexual harassment at work: Targets’ perspectives on prevention and response”, PLoS One 21(7): e0352783: 30 interviews
- Jennifer J. Freyd, “Institutional Betrayal and Institutional Courage”, University of Oregon: the definitions and the Institutional Betrayal Questionnaire
- David C. Yamada, “Workplace bullying, DARVO, and aggressors claiming victim status”, Minding the Workplace, 7 March 2019 (blog post)
- EEOC Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace, Report of Co-Chairs Feldblum and Lipnic, June 2016: reporting rates and the reasons people give for not reporting
- Cortina & Magley (2003), “Raising Voice, Risking Retaliation”, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 8(4), 247: survey of 1,167 public-sector employees
- 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-3(a): Title VII’s opposition and participation clauses (Cornell LII)
- EEOC, “Time Limits for Filing a Charge”: the 180 and 300 day windows run from the discriminatory act
- EEOC Enforcement Guidance on Retaliation and Related Issues, EEOC 915.004, 25 August 2016
- EEOC, “EEOC Commission Votes to Rescind 2024 Harassment Guidance”, 23 January 2026
Review schedule. The research position is re-verified every six months, since this is an active area and a workplace study could publish at any time; the EEOC material annually. The Verified date above is set at import and is the date the facts here were last checked. General information on US law, not legal advice for a particular situation.