FL9 - Victims of Crime: Gaslighting

Question 1

What is gaslighting?

Answer 1

• Gaslighting - a tactic of psychological manipulation that can make the individual feel crazy
• “Gaslighting is not to merely disagree with a person’s opinions. A person can vigorously and passionately disagree even on issues of experience and emotion without it being gaslighting. Gaslighting is an effort to make the victim doubt themselves so that they will be more vulnerable and so that the gaslighter can take advantage of their loss of confidence.”

Question 2

How is gaslighting a present topic in popular culture?

Answer 2

• Reality TV, social media such as tiktok
• Increase of awareness

Question 3

Where did the concept of gaslighting originally emerge from?

Answer 3

• Gaslighting emerged from use in intimate partner violence
• Gaslighting within popular culture doesn’t replicate how gaslighting occurs in IPV - used more flippantly, more severe in domestic violence

Question 4

What are the major elements of gaslighting?

Answer 4

1. Perpetrator controls the narrative
   
   1. Benefits the perpetrator to look better, fabricate the story
2. Isolation
   
   1. Destabilising support network - creating an image of a good person to others so manipulation seems out of character
3. Intention
   
   1. From the survey, PPT thing it should be intentional to be gaslighting
4. Power disparity
   
   1. Social status, economic status,
5. Victim questions reality

Question 5

What did a survey find about gaslighting in IPV?

Answer 5

• Aim of study
  
  • To identify the key definitions, behaviours, and impacts of gaslighting experienced by victim survivors of domestic violence
• Participants
  
  • 248 Victim Survivors of Domestic Violence (95% Female)
  • Mean age: 42 years (Range 20 – 79)
• Analysis
  
  • Thematic analysis

Question 6

What are the impacts of ongoing gaslighting?

Answer 6

1. Cognitive change
   
   1. Do not know what is real or not real, including about yourself
   2. Development of mental health conditions, such as anxiety or the false belief they have a mental health condition
2. Emotional
   
   1. Heightened sensitivity to social interactions & that people are looking at you
3. Behavioural changes
   
   1. Loss of autonomy, feeling you need someone else to guide you to make decisions
   2. Changes to personality - withdrawal, people pleaser
4. Social changes
   
   1. Withdrawal from social situations due to new dynamic, can contribute to loss of friendships
   2. Struggle to make new friendships due to lack of trust in others
5. Physical
   
   1. Worsening physical health conditions (chronic pain, weight fluctuations etc. from stressors)
   2. Fatigue

Question 7

How does gaslighting impact memory and belief?

Answer 7

• Misinformation effect
  
  • Altering a memory based on information encountered post event
    
    • Internal factors
      
      • Situational (stereotypes, environment)
      • Personal (confidence, state anxiety) - Less consistent research
    • External factors
      
      • Other sources of information are taken on by the person

Question 8

How do people come to believe false information about their own lives?

Answer 8

• Autobiographical Memories (Brewer, 1996)
  1. Belief in the occurrence of the event
  2. Recollection (event related imagery)
  3. Belief in the accuracy of the recollection
• Non-Believed Memories (Otgaar et al., 2012)
  
  • Vivid recollection without belief (non-believed memory)
  • Strong belief without recollection
• Nested model of false beliefs and false memories
  
  • Have remembered event, qualified by belief event have occurred, qualified by personal plausible events which qualifies generally plausible events
  • But in gaslighting, others qualify these things rather than yourself

Question 9

What did the experiment between autobiographical memory find?

Answer 9

• Aim of Study
  
  • Investigate the impact of misinformation and memory challenges from a close partner on memory, confidence, and wellbeing
• Participants
  
  • 85 Dyads (19 Romantic couples, 66 Close Friends)
  • Mean relationship length (4.5 years)
• Design
  
  • Within-Subjects Pre-Post Design
  • Random allocation to role of ‘gaslighter’ and ‘victim
• Findings
  
  • Memory Accuracy
    
    • Victims took on an average of 25% of the misinformation introduced by their partner
  • Memory Confidence
    
    • Confidence in overall memory accuracy went down after exercise
  • Self-Esteem
    
    • Self-reported self-esteem went up after exercise - unexpected results
    • Don’t feel any worse for changing their beliefs
  • Negative Affect
    
    • Negative affect went down after exercise
    • Counterintuitive results show how we perceive victims of abuse generally

Question 10

What did Epstein & Goodman (2019) find about perceptions of domestic violence survivors in court?

Answer 10

• Story plausibility in Domestic Violence Survivors
  
  • Internal consistency (e.g., neurological and psychological trauma such as TBI or PTSD) - Need to make logical and emotional sense but domestic violence have higher trauma so it can create troubles with memory, speaking and ability to create logical narrative
  • External consistency (e.g., victims who stay with their partner, focus on psychological vs physical forms of abuse) - Difficult for non-survivors to understand behaviour of survivors & don’t see psychological abuse as severe as physical - so if don’t lead with physical abuse tend to dismiss the case as not serious

Question 11

What did the experiment into public perceptions of gaslighting find?

Answer 11

• Method
  
  • Vignette Study of Gaslighting
• Participants
  
  • 601 (74.5% female)
• Preliminary Findings
  
  • Majority (n=575) were aware of what the term ‘gaslighting’ was.
  • Participants were able to recognise gaslighting behaviours in written stories, and ranked the behaviour as more severe depending on key factors to victim-survivors (e.g., repetition, intention, response)
  • Public becoming more aware of gaslighting behaviour

Question 11

What is coercive control?

Answer 11

• A pattern of controlling and manipulative behaviour designed to intimidate, isolate, and control a person.
• Examples
  
  • Coercion and threats
  • Intimidation
  • Emotional abuse
  • Isolation
  • Using financial control/economic abuse
  • Using children (as tools, threats)

Question 12

What does gaslighting look like in legislation?

Answer 12

• Parliament of Australia review → Coercive control is the worst form of abuse they experience and can have more immediate and ongoing impact than physical forms of violence
• 99% of domestic homicides were preceded by coercive control
  
  • New law on coercive control in NSW
    
    • Criminalises behaviour that
      
      • Threatens to harm a child
      • Economically abusive
      • Harrasses a person
      • Monitors their activities
      • Causes damage to property
      • Isolates the person
    • Ignores emotional factors

Question 13

What are the questions to consider about gaslighting?

Answer 13

• Is is possible to criminalise psychological abuse such as gaslighting?
• If we were to legally define gaslighting, where would we draw the line?
• How would we gather evidence for these behaviours?