Virtue Signalling and Performative Justice: When Institutional Rhetoric Promises Support but Actions Serve Self-Interest

There is evidence that suggests a complex and often contradictory societal response to victims of abuse, where public declarations of support frequently contrast with the lived realities of those affected. Shallow expressions of sympathy and outrage often amount to little more than moral posturing or opportunism, rather than a meaningful commitment to minimising harm through trauma-informed human connection. While individuals and institutions champion justice and truth in their rhetoric, they routinely dictate the terms on which disclosures and expressions of trauma are accepted—prioritising self-interest, public reputation, and convenience.

Rather than providing genuine safety, they control how suffering is recognised, validated, and addressed—often in ways that serve their own interests. This creates an insidious power dynamic in which those unaffected by abuse determine who is allowed to be heard, under what conditions trauma is acknowledged, and whether support is granted or withheld. Instead of alleviating harm, they manipulate the narrative to both hide and reinforce systemic failures and exploit suffering for their own gain—becoming both beneficiaries and enablers of the very crimes they so noisily condemn.

Virtue Signalling and Encouraging Disclosure

Modern society publicly promotes the idea that victims of abuse should ‘speak up’ and share their experiences. Campaigns like #MeToo, public health initiatives, and awareness programmes frequently stress the importance of breaking silence as a pathway to justice and healing. Similarly, mental health campaigns such as ‘It’s OK Not to Be OK’ encourage people to be open about their struggles, framing disclosure as an essential step towards support and recovery.

This stance is seen as virtuous—standing against abuse, validating survivors, and fostering communication and safety without judgement. Yet, despite these public endorsements of openness, the response to individual disclosures often tells a different story. Victims and those struggling with mental health issues may find that support is conditional, disclosures are met with discomfort, scepticism, and silence. Institutions, even those heavily invested in support rhetoric, fail to provide meaningful protection or aid. The contradiction between public advocacy and reality exposes a deeper societal reluctance to truly engage with those impacted by trauma and distress.

Stigmatisation of Victimhood

Many individuals who disclose abuse report feeling stigmatised. Research indicates that society has a tendency to valorise resilience, self-sufficiency, and stoicism, which can lead to the subtle (or even overt) marginalisation of people who need to express ongoing pain or dependency. For example:

• Emotional Responses Perceived as Weakness: Victims who exhibit “needy” or outwardly emotional behaviour may be perceived as less credible or mature than those who remain calm and composed.
• Blame and Responsibility Shifting: In some cases, there is an implicit expectation that victims “move on” quickly and avoid burdening others, leading to perceptions of weakness or attention-seeking if they remain visibly affected by their experiences.

Preference for the “Rational and Calm”

Research in social psychology and trauma studies highlights that society often rewards individuals who embody traits such as rationality, calmness, and personal responsibility. These traits are viewed as markers of emotional maturity and stability, while visible vulnerability can trigger discomfort, pity, or even annoyance in others. This creates a paradox:

• The paradox of disclosure: A disclosure that disrupts social harmony, challenges cultural beliefs or ideals, or demands a proactive response from individuals or organisations—whether emotional or financial—may be perceived as selfish, intrusive, inconsiderate, a sign of emotional instability, burdensome, or indicative of a lack of maturity, self-control, and rationality. Conversely, non-disclosure, ‘quiet endurance,’ or being effectively silenced after unsuccessful attempts to share struggles or trauma is often conveniently framed as taking personal responsibility, demonstrating mental strength, and exhibiting self-control, even when rooted in repressed anger, fear, or traits associated with anti-social personality disorders. This paradox of disclosure reflects the difficulty individuals and institutions face in meaningfully and productively acknowledging others’ deeply personal and private experiences.

• The false equivalence of composure and detachment: Rationality and calmness are frequently equated with emotional strength, yet they share a close and often dangerous bond with detachment and calculated coldness. Whilst all these traits can appear as virtues on the surface, the latter actually enables harm in largely imperceptible and far-reaching ways.

Moral Discomfort and the Sense of Duty

Disclosure of abuse can elicit feelings of moral discomfort, anger, guilt aversion, and cognitive dissonance in the recepient of the disclosed information, especially if they feel they should intervene or support the victim but lack the resources, willingness, or ability to do so. This discomfort can result in:

• Minimising the Experience: Downplaying the victim’s pain to lessen their own sense of responsibility.
• Encouraging Silence: Implicitly or explicitly pressuring the victim to “keep it to themselves” to avoid creating discomfort for others.

This dynamic is not limited to individuals. Institutions—whether workplaces, religious organisations, or public bodies—engage in similar behaviours, driven by internal priorities such as reputation management, financial interests, or legal liability. This results in systemic failures where safeguarding policies exist in name but are undermined in practice, creating environments where harm is tolerated, concealed, or even enabled.

• Workplace Settings: Studies show that victims of workplace harassment or bullying who disclose are often perceived as “troublemakers,” while those who remain silent may be viewed as more professional or composed.
• Legal and Social Services: Research has found that victims who appear emotional or distressed during police interviews or in courtrooms are less likely to be believed compared to those who present their experiences calmly.
• Everyday Interactions: Survivors frequently report that their pain or trauma is met with superficial responses, discomfort, dismissiveness, silence or even hostility from institutions, friends and family, reinforcing the idea that non-disclosure is preferable.

Cultural Narratives

This dynamic may also be rooted in broader cultural narratives that idealise the ‘strong, silent’ archetype. In contrast, openly expressing pain—particularly in ways that make others uncomfortable—is often pathologised or dismissed as self-indulgence.

As a result, certain victims and vulnerable groups are selectively elevated as symbols of suffering, not necessarily because they are the only ones in need of safety and support, but because they are the most palatable. Their pain is easier to package into digestible narratives that allow society to wave a placard of solidarity without engaging with the deeply unsettling and complex realities of suffering.

Children, particularly female children, then women more broadly, often become the focus of public concern—not always out of genuine care, but because their victimhood fits a socially accepted framework of innocence and helplessness. Meanwhile, other at-risk groups, such as male victims, marginalised communities, and those whose trauma does not conform to conventional narratives, remain overlooked or even vilified. Their suffering is too uncomfortable, too politically inconvenient, or too difficult to address without dismantling deeply entrenched systems of power and complicity.

After generations of female victims demanding an end to victim-blaming, there has been little more than a shift in targeting. And even this might overestimate progress—because while rhetoric has grown louder, there is little evidence that female suffering itself has been meaningfully addressed. The words have changed, but the structures remain the same. Support is proclaimed, yet needs remain unmet. The cycle persists, wrapped in new language but bound by the same failures.

Indeed society’s attitudes towards disclosure are riddled with contradictions. Publicly, we may virtue signal the importance of speaking out, but privately, societal norms often penalise visible pain and reward stoicism and silence. This creates a challenging environment for victims of abuse, who may feel pressure to conform to unrealistic ideals of resilience rather than being given the space and support needed to heal authentically.

The preference for calm, rational demeanours over emotional or maladaptive responses can quickly lead to systemic failures, particularly in legal institutions, law enforcement, and first-responder interactions. This phenomenon not only exacerbates the stigma faced by victims but can also facilitate further harm by enabling abusers to weaponise societal biases turning trauma into the crime.

Legal Institutions and Biases

Victims of abuse often face an uphill battle in legal systems, where composure and rationality are unfairly equated with credibility. Abusers, who are often adept at manipulation and control, may present themselves as calm, reasonable individuals, further tilting the scales in their favour. This dynamic plays out in several ways:

• Trauma Responses Misinterpreted: Victims’ natural trauma responses—crying, agitation, forgetfulness, or inconsistency in their stories—are often seen as indicators of dishonesty or instability, rather than as evidence of the abuse they’ve endured.
• Abusers Using Calmness to Their Advantage: Many abusers, especially those with narcissistic or sociopathic tendencies, excel at maintaining a composed exterior, which reinforces their credibility in contrast to a victim who may appear “out of control” or emotional.
• Victim-Blaming Narratives: Victims’ maladaptive behaviours, often developed as survival mechanisms during the abuse (e.g., substance use, defensive anger, or distrust), are sometimes framed as justification for the abuse or as evidence that they are unreliable or criminally culpable for the abuse that they had to endure.

First Responders and Police Dynamics

Research into police and first-responder interactions with victims of abuse reveals a similar pattern of bias:

• Aligning with the Calm Individual: Police officers often gravitate towards the person who appears composed and cooperative, while interpreting a victim’s distress or agitation as irrationality or guilt. This bias is further compounded by inadequate training that results in a widespread inability to recognise trauma-induced reactions, leading to misjudgments during investigations and interviews.

• Arresting Victims: In domestic abuse cases, victims are sometimes arrested or treated as aggressors—particularly if they have physically retaliated or if their trauma responses are misinterpreted as hostility. Abusers frequently exploit this by adopting a rational, detached demeanour in front of law enforcement, manipulating officers into viewing them as the “true victim.”

• Failure to Recognise Coercive Control: Many police officers are trained to prioritise overt physical evidence over more insidious forms of abuse, such as coercive control and psychological manipulation. As a result, victims of emotional and psychological abuse are often dismissed or overlooked. Meanwhile, the actual perpetrators craft a convenient narrative that law enforcement readily accepts, leaving their victims crushed under the weight of legal and systemic failures immediately after domestic abuse.

Systemic Reinforcement of Abuser Narratives

These dynamics and biases within individuals and systems inadvertently reinforce abusers’ control over their victims:

• Silencing Victims: Victims who are dismissed, disbelieved, or even punished for speaking out become unable to receive urgent care and less likely to seek help in the future. This strengthens the abuser’s power, and deepens trauma, exacerbating the victim’s injuries, as the victim becomes further isolated.
• Enabling Abusers: When abusers are validated by first responders or the legal system, they are emboldened to continue their behaviour, knowing they can manipulate societal and institutional biases to their advantage.

The Role of Trauma Responses

To understand why this dynamic occurs, it’s essential to consider the nature of trauma responses:

• Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn: Victims may exhibit a range of responses, from anger and aggression (fight), to withdrawal or dissociation (freeze), to overly compliant behaviour (fawn). These responses are often judged harshly by those unfamiliar with trauma, leading to misinterpretation.
• Chronic Dysregulation: Victims of long-term abuse often experience difficulty regulating their emotions, which can manifest as panic, hypervigilance, or emotional outbursts. In contrast, abusers often appear outwardly composed, as they are not experiencing the same level of internal dysregulation.
• Coercive Control: Legal and law enforcement frameworks should be updated to include a better understanding of coercive control and psychological abuse, not just physical harm.
• Shifting the Credibility Metric: Institutions need to move away from equating calmness with truthfulness and recognise that emotional responses are often a direct result of victimisation.

Intersection with Gender Norms

This dynamic is further complicated by societal gender norms:

• Women as “Hysterical”: Female victims are often dismissed as overly emotional or irrational, stereotypes that have deep historical roots.
• Men as “Aggressors”: Male victims, on the other hand, are often dismissed outright—perceived as weak if their claims are believed or assumed to be perpetrators when they attempt to break the cycle of abuse. This results in significant barriers to reporting abuse or seeking help, leaving many trapped in silence.
• Trauma-Informed Training: Police, first responders, and legal professionals must receive training to recognise and appropriately respond to trauma, including understanding the range of victim responses.

Society’s discomfort with vulnerability and authentic displays of emotions, combined with systemic biases, creates an environment where victims are doubly harmed—first by their abusers and then by the very systems meant to protect them. Addressing this requires a fundamental cultural and institutional shift towards trauma-informed, empathetic practices that prioritise justice and healing over superficial assessments of credibility often driven by self-interest.

Trauma and Abuse Histories

There is substantial evidence that this paradigm—victim-blaming, victim-silencing, and retraumatisation—is exacerbated by the way past experiences of abuse increase the likelihood of revictimisation. Victims of abuse often carry the psychological and behavioural imprints of their trauma, which, rather than eliciting understanding, can provoke further scepticism, stigmatisation, or outright dismissal of their disclosures. It is misinformed to presume that trauma fosters an alert system of resilience—instead, it can shape a person’s expectations, responses, and even unconscious signals in ways that increase the likelihood of further victimisation. When harm becomes part of one’s lived experience, the mind adapts, sometimes normalising danger or making it harder to recognise red flags. In this way, rather than ensuring safety, past trauma can unwittingly create conditions that invite repetition—both through personal patterns of response and through the way predators recognise and exploit vulnerability. This dynamic can reinforce harmful narratives about victims being attention seekers or to blame, making it harder for them to seek help, be believed, or find justice.

Victim-Blaming and Trauma Histories

Studies consistently show that victims with a history of prior abuse are at greater risk of being disbelieved, blamed, or dismissed. This is because:

• “Damaged Goods” Perception: Victims with a history of abuse are often stereotyped as “troubled” or inherently dysfunctional. Their behaviours, shaped by trauma (e.g., hypervigilance, emotional dysregulation, emotional outbursts, or self-blame), are wrongly seen as evidence of instability or unreliability rather than the natural consequences of victimisation.
• Cyclical Nature of Abuse Misinterpreted: The phenomenon of revictimisation is often misunderstood as evidence that the victim is somehow “attracting” or “causing” the abuse, rather than recognising how trauma dynamics can make someone more vulnerable.

Misinterpreting Trauma Responses as Problematic

Victims of abuse often exhibit behaviours that are shaped by their trauma histories, including:

• Emotional Intensity or Dysregulation: Trauma survivors may react with heightened emotional responses due to hyperarousal or triggers, which can be misread as exaggeration, overreaction, aggression or even manipulative behaviour.
• Difficulty Providing Linear Narratives: Trauma impacts memory and recall, often leading to fragmented or inconsistent accounts of abuse. This is a well-documented phenomenon in neuroscience but is frequently misinterpreted by law enforcement, courts, or support systems as lying or fantasising.
• Maladaptive Coping Mechanisms: Behaviours such as substance use, self-harm, withdrawal, confrontation, and attempts to re-engage, which are all common among abuse survivors, can be stigmatised and used to discredit victims, rather than being understood as survival mechanisms.

Secondary Victimisation and Retraumatisation

When victims disclose their experiences, they often face what is termed “secondary victimisation”—additional harm caused by the responses of institutions or individuals. This includes:

• Scepticism: Abuse disclosures from individuals with traumatic lives can lead to the victim being labelled as a “serial victim” or fantasist, with institutions assuming their claims lack credibility due to repeated experiences of harm.
• Retraumatisation Through Dismissive Responses: Being disbelieved, blamed, or treated as problematic for expressing pain or abuse reinforces the victim’s trauma, often mirroring the dynamics of powerlessness and invalidation they experienced during the original abuse.

Research

Several studies highlight how past trauma histories are misinterpreted and used against victims:

• Revictimisation as a Cycle: A significant body of research shows that individuals with trauma histories are more likely to experience further abuse. This is due to factors such as learned helplessness, difficulty setting boundaries, and being targeted by abusers who exploit their vulnerabilities. However, instead of recognising these factors, institutions often frame the victim as “the common denominator” and blame them for their experiences.
• Credibility and Trauma Symptoms: A study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence found that victims displaying PTSD symptoms (e.g., emotional volatility, fragmented memory) were less likely to be believed, as their behaviours were interpreted as signs of deceit or instability.
• Courtroom Dynamics: In legal settings, victims with trauma histories are more likely to have their character questioned. Defence lawyers often exploit a victim’s past trauma or actions to suggest they are prone to exaggeration, confusion, or lying.

The Harmful Narrative of the “Perfect Victim”

These dynamics are further reinforced by society’s expectation of the “perfect victim”—someone who is female, calm, rational, and without a complex history to speak of. Society must move away from the “perfect victim” trope and create space for diverse, authentic expressions of pain and survival.

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The “Cycle of Abuse”, Pathologisation and Repeated Victimisation

Research consistently shows that individuals who have experienced abuse in the past are more likely to be re-victimised in future relationships or contexts. This is often due to:

• Conditioning and Normalisation: Victims of childhood or past abuse may unconsciously normalise abusive behaviours, making them more vulnerable to abusive dynamics as adults.
• Learned Helplessness and Coercion: A history of abuse can foster patterns of learned helplessness, making it harder for victims to assert boundaries or leave harmful situations.
• Targeting by Perpetrators: Abusers often exploit individuals who display signs of past trauma or vulnerability, as they may perceive them as easier to manipulate or less likely to be believed if they speak out.

Despite these well-understood patterns, victims’ histories are often weaponised against them, reinforcing damaging stereotypes and systemic biases. When victims disclose abuse, their history of past trauma often leads to their experiences being dismissed or invalidated. This occurs in several ways:

• Pathologising the Victim: A history of trauma can lead to mental health struggles such as PTSD, anxiety, depression, or dissociation. Instead of recognising these as natural responses to abuse, society often pathologises victims, viewing them as unstable or unreliable.
• Viewing Victims as “Problematic”: Victims may exhibit behaviours that are coping mechanisms for past trauma (e.g., hypervigilance, emotional dysregulation, or an inability to trust others). These behaviours are frequently framed as evidence that the victim is “difficult” or “part of the problem,” rather than as symptoms of their abuse.
• Dismissing Disclosures as Fantasies: If a victim has a history of trauma, their credibility may be undermined by perceptions that they are prone to exaggeration, confusion, or fabrication. This bias is particularly damaging in legal and institutional settings, where victims may already struggle to be heard, believed, and effectively communicate their experiences. Instead of receiving appropriate support, they may be mishandled or ignored, sometimes even being labelled as delusional. Such treatment leads to secondary victimisation and further harm.

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Secondary Victimisation by Institutions

The interplay between past trauma and present victimisation often results in secondary victimisation when victims interact with institutions:

• Police and Legal Systems: Victims with a history of abuse may be perceived as unreliable witnesses. Their emotional responses or trauma symptoms are often interpreted as delusional, irrational or overly dramatic, undermining their credibility.
• Mental Health Professionals: Some mental health practitioners, particularly those lacking trauma-informed training, could misinterpret victims’ accounts as delusions or exaggerations, especially if the victim has a history of complex trauma or dissociation.
• Social Perceptions: Friends, family, or colleagues may interpret a victim’s repeated experiences of abuse or overt reactions to trauma as evidence of either causation, their complicity, poor judgment, or a ‘victim mentality,’ rather than acknowledging the systemic and psychological factors that contribute to re-victimisation.

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The Misinterpretation of Trauma Responses

Victims of repeated abuse often exhibit trauma responses that are misunderstood or stigmatised:

• Hypervigilance: Victims may appear paranoid or overly cautious, which can be misinterpreted as irrationality or “being difficult”.
• Emotional Dysregulation: Intense emotional responses, such as withdrawal, crying or anger, may be dismissed as attention-seeking or unstable behaviour, rather than as symptoms of trauma.
• Fragmented Memories: Trauma can disrupt memory consolidation, leading to gaps or inconsistencies in victims’ accounts as well as a temporary inability to communicate, especially if placed under stress. These inconsistencies are often used to discredit victims, particularly during police and legal proceedings.
• Fawning or Over-Accommodating Behaviour:  Victims who adopt fawning behaviours—appeasing others to avoid conflict—may unintentionally reinforce the perception that they are ‘too compliant’ or fabricating abuse claims. Their efforts to placate an abuser, along with a lack of firm boundaries, are too often misinterpreted as complicity rather than recognised as survival responses, leading to further doubt and dismissal of their experiences. Yet, when victims eventually push back—often in the later stages, after enduring prolonged abuse—their attempts to assert boundaries through the blurred lens of trauma are reframed as aggression, instability, or even abuse. This paradox ensures that no response is ever deemed ‘correct,’ leaving victims trapped in a cycle of isolation, doubt, dismissal, and blame. The same coercive dynamic repeats itself when victims interact with police and the legal system. Under pressure from authority figures, victims may be subtly or overtly squeezed into submission—agreeing to minimised accounts of their experiences, downplaying their suffering, or complying with legal proceedings they do not fully understand, or feel unsafe navigating. Later, this very submission is weaponised against them, presented as proof of consent, agreement, or complicity. Conversely, if a victim refuses to comply—if they persist in asserting their reality, refusing to alter their testimony, or challenging procedural injustice—they face escalating threats of punishment. They may be treated as uncooperative, combative, or even criminally responsible. Some are accused of wasting police time, of exaggerating their claims, of being intentionally difficult or unstable, particularly if they display trauma-induced distress or frustration. Victims risk being criminalised themselves, with claims against them gaining more traction simply because the victim refuses to ‘behave’ within the system’s unspoken rules of submission. This institutional mirroring of the abuser’s tactics reinforces the same impossible paradox: submit and be disbelieved, or resist and be punished. In both cases, the victim’s behaviour—whether yielding or defiant—is reframed to serve the interests of those in power, ensuring that they remain trapped in a system designed to protect and serve itself rather than those it claims to understand.

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The “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” of Stigma

When victims with past trauma are dismissed, blamed, or retraumatised, it can create a self-fulfilling prophecy:

• Isolation and Silencing: Victims may internalise the stigma, leading them to physical injury, withdrawing from seeking help or disclosing future abuse. This further entrenches the perception that they are unstable or irrational, choosing to remain isolated or in abusive situations, or have a victim-mentality.
• Reinforcing Abuser Narratives: Abusers often exploit societal biases to discredit their victims, pointing to their victim’s trauma history as evidence to hide the abuser’s abuse. Institutions that fail to recognise these dynamics inadvertently validate the abuser’s narrative and criminalise their victim’s normal reactions to abnormal experiences.
• Cumulative Trauma: Each instance of dismissal, disbelief, or retraumatisation adds to the victim’s trauma, making recovery even more challenging and reinforcing maladaptive behaviours that are then misunderstood by others.

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Conclusion

The interplay between past trauma and present victimisation creates a dangerous paradigm where victims are silenced, stigmatised, and retraumatised. This cycle is perpetuated by societal and institutional biases that misunderstand trauma responses and pathologise victims’ histories. Addressing this requires a shift towards trauma-informed practices, a rejection of victim-blaming narratives, and a recognition of the systemic factors that enable abuse to persist. Without these changes, victims will continue to face the dual burden of surviving abuse and defending their credibility against deeply ingrained and flawed predispositions that favour perpetrators over victims. Abusers who exploit psychological and societal biases to discredit victims should face scrutiny for their manipulation tactics, particularly in institutional or legal settings. Systems must move away from equating calmness and consistency with truthfulness, recognising that trauma can disrupt memory and emotional regulation.

As long as individuals and institutions maintain control over the terms on which disclosures and expressions of trauma are accepted, patterns of dismissal, disbelief, and secondary victimisation will continue to compound the victim’s trauma. This not only hinders recovery but also reinforces maladaptive behaviours that are often misinterpreted by others. The broader societal consequences of this cycle are profound and difficult to quantify.