Abuse victims often fall prey to gaslighting, which is when an abuser causes doubt to their victim’s sanity through psychological manipulation. Joker accomplishes this when Harley is still a practicing psychiatrist assigned to his case in Arkham Asylum and continues it after she breaks him out.

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Gaslighting is hard to identify and not widely known, thus making the victim feel isolated and alone in their plight when it happens to them. Sharon Hayes calls it “romantic terrorism” and that may be a very apt description. The important thing to be taken her is that the Joker does have coercive control as Hayes writes:

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Coercive control can be distinguished from a bad relationship (in which both partners are abusive toward each other) by identifying a perpetrator’s intent to control and the consequent negative outcomes for his or her victim. The victim’s experience of coercive control can be likened to being taken hostage; the victim becomes captive in a dreamlike world created by the perpetrator, in which she is entrapped by confusion, contradiction and fear. Coercive control takes away victims’ freedom and strips away their sense of self. Much like a hostage held by a terrorist, a woman’s bodily integrity maybe violated, but more profoundly she is stripped of her basic human right to freedom of thought and action.

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For a light example, imagine you let a friend borrow a book of yours. However, when you ask for it back, your friend says “I didn’t borrow your book last week. What are you talking about?” knowing full well that he did and lost it, but refusing to tell you, therefore making you doubt if you even lent it to him in the first place. The insidiousness of it is that from your perspective, he very well could have forgotten that he has it or that he could be lying. But victims of gaslighting usually like to blame themselves than question others, like Harley Quinn does.

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In her case, in the comic Mad Love, her first comic book appearance, we learn how she came to be Harley Quinn. While still a psychiatrist treating the Joker, he tells her about the times his father abused him. Later, Batman tells Harley how all the stories Joker told her were all fabricated because Joker is a master manipulator and he knew it would garner her sympathy. This illustrates that Harley has no idea whether or not Joker is ever telling her the truth about him despite her declarations of love.

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Harley Quinn is stripped of her sense of self when she is with the Joker. She does not understand this because she is in love with him, even going so far as to forgive him for his misdeeds and terrorism against her. She must cope with Gotham City’s sexism as both Batman and Joker seem to never take her seriously and she must cope with Joker’s abuse and treachery when he tries to eliminate her.

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She eventually runs into the arms of Poison Ivy and together, they try to heal Harley of the Joker’s influence, with numerous bumps in the road. Austin concludes her paper with a very profound sentiment on women and their threat:

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Batman’s female villains ultimately exemplify what it means to be a woman forced to cope with the gender biases prevalent in a male-dominated society. It is precisely through their acts of resistance to societal and gender expectations that they are penalized and more thoroughly portrayed as villainous than are most of the male villains who commit similar crimes. Furthermore, it is their willingness to aid one another that makes them seem more dangerous, the threat of women helping women attain power and liberation too extreme a notion for those who wish to retain traditional gender roles.