Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially at fault for the harm done to them. There is historical and current prejudice against the victims of domestic violence and sex crimes, such as the greater tendency to blame victims of rape than victims of robbery if victims and perpetrators knew each other prior to the commission of the crime. The Gay Panic Defense has been characterized as a form of victim blaming.

Psychologist William Ryan coined the phrase "blaming the victim" in his 1971 book of that title. Ryan described victim blaming as an ideology used to justify racism and social injustice against black people in the United States. Ryan wrote the book to refute Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 work The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (usually simply referred to as the Moynihan Report).

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. The Black family is usually portrayed as gang affiliated, single-parent or very violent. Aggression and violent behavior in children has been linked to television programming. Moynihan advocated the implementation of government programs designed to strengthen the black nuclear family.

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 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 theory as an attempt 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. In 1947 Theodor W. 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 (1950), which included among the fascist traits of the scale the "contempt for everything discriminated against or weak." Typical expressions of victim blaming are the idiomatic statement "She was asking for it", or the question "Why didn't she leave?", said of a victim of violence or sexual assault.

The just-world fallacy is proposed as one explanation for victim blaming: it rejects the disquieting idea that bad things undeservedly happen to people; in its place is the more comforting notion that victims must have done something to deserve their fate. A corollary is that one can avoid becoming a victim by behaving correctly. Though an ancient idea, the just-world fallacy was revived by social psychology in the 1960s, beginning with Melvin J. Lerner.

Secondary victimization is the re-traumatization of a victim through the responses of individuals and institutions. Types of secondary victimization include victim blaming, disbelieving the victim's story, minimizing the severity of the attack, and inappropriate post-assault treatment by medical personnel or other organizations. Secondary victimization is especially common in cases of drug-facilitated, acquaintance, military sexual trauma and statutory rape.