Institutional betrayal

A concept developed by psychologist Jennifer Freyd to describe the specific harm that occurs when institutions people depend on for safety, care, or support fail to prevent injury, exploit vulnerability, or respond inadequately to known risks, and then deny, minimise, or reframe that harm in ways that protect the institution rather than those injured. Freyd emphasises that betrayal often takes the form of omission rather than overt abuse—under-staffing, inadequate training, failure to intervene, and refusal to acknowledge harm—combined with institutional responses that shift responsibility onto individuals or families.

In the context of schooling, institutional betrayal helps explain how educational systems produce harm through chronic under-resourcing, exclusionary practices, and reliance on unpaid family and sibling labour, while presenting the resulting distress as pre-existing dysfunction or poor coping. Schools harm students by denying adequate support, permitting boundary violations, and disappearing quiet suffering; they then compound that harm by treating dysregulation, family strain, or sibling conflict as private problems rather than as predictable outcomes of institutional failure. Institutional betrayal names how schools preserve their legitimacy by forgetting the injuries they create—offloading the cost of inadequate support into the home, reframing institutional abandonment as family pathology, and positioning parents and children as the problem to be managed rather than acknowledging systemic responsibility.