Institutional betrayal

Institutional betrayal is a concept the psychologist Jennifer Freyd introduced to describe wrongdoing that an institution commits against people who depend on it, including the institution's own failure to prevent, or to respond supportively to, wrongdoing such as sexual assault that individuals within it commit against one another. Freyd developed the idea as an extension of her earlier betrayal trauma theory, which examined how trauma inflicted by someone a person depends on and trusts, such as a caregiver, tends to be especially psychologically damaging; institutional betrayal applies that same logic to organizations, arguing that a university, hospital, government agency or branch of the military can inflict comparable harm on its own members when it dismisses complaints, protects wrongdoers, or otherwise fails the very people who trusted it for protection. The concept has been applied across a wide range of real institutions, including universities' handling of sexual assault reports, hospitals' responses to patient harm, and the military's record on addressing misconduct within its ranks, framing these failures as a recognizable pattern rather than isolated incidents.