Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially at fault for the harm that befell them. Psychologist William Ryan coined the phrase "blaming the victim" in his book of that title. Moynihan had concluded that three centuries of oppression of black people, and in particular with what he calls the uniquely cruel structure of American slavery as opposed to its Latin American counterparts, had created a long series of chaotic disruptions within the black family structure which, at the time of the report, manifested itself in high rates of unwed births, absent fathers, and single mother households in black families.
Moynihan then correlated these familial outcomes, which he considered undesirable, to the relatively poorer rates of employment, educational achievement, and financial success found among the black population. The black family structure is also being affected by media through the children. Aggression and violent behavior in children has been linked to television programming.
Ryan objected that Moynihan then located the proximate cause of the plight of black Americans in the prevalence of a family structure in which the father was often sporadically, if at all, present, and the mother was often dependent on government aid to feed, clothe, and provide medical care for her children.
Ryan's critique cast the Moynihan theories as attempts to divert responsibility for poverty from social structural factors to the behaviors and cultural patterns of the poor. Although Ryan popularized the phrase, other scholars had identified the phenomenon of victim blaming. Adorno defined what would be later called "blaming the victim," as "one of the most sinister features of the Fascist character". Shortly thereafter Adorno and three other professors at the University of California, Berkeley formulated their influential and highly debated F-scale F for fascist , published in The Authoritarian Personality , which included among the fascist traits of the scale the "contempt for everything discriminated against or weak.
The just-world fallacy is proposed as one explanation for why people blame victims: rejecting the uncomfortable idea that bad things happen to people randomly and undeservedly results in a false belief that victims must have done something to deserve what happened to them.
