It’s Vocabulary Day!

Welcome to Uncle Steve’s Clubhouse, boys and girls! Today is vocabulary day, and we’re going to learn a new word. “DARVO.” Here’s a description:

“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. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of “falsely accused” and attacks the accuser’s credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.

Institutional DARVO occurs when the DARVO is committed by an institution (or with institutional complicity) as when police charge rape victims with lying. Institutional DARVO is a pernicious form of institutional betrayaL”

(https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/defineDARVO.html?fbclid=IwAR1w8wWhNvx2pa-iVP8qLoD_VtVHtLls4bbGIaO88VGaSSlaDwAqASAZXDo)

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I hate to say it, but I once learned something about human nature from a Steven Seagal movie. I’m mortified, but it’s true. (I guess I actually learned two things from Seagal. One from a movie written by someone else, one from something he said when we had lunch. But that is a different story for…