By definition a 'scapegoat' is an innocent accused, blamed, and punished for someone else's sins, faults, mistakes, and problems. Other words used are a whipping boy or of a whip-boy. We all use a whipping boy each time we blame some one else for something we don't want to face in ourselves. In most cases scapegoating is an unconscious process. We are blaming the scapegoat without being aware that we are to blame, not the innocent scapegoat. In ancient times and in some cultures, the nobility could not be touched, thus they kept a whipping boy for this purpose. When a crime was committed that warranted physical punishment, a whipping-boy was used. Usually the whipping-boy was educated with, for instance, a prince and whipped whenever the prince deserved chastisement. DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS: Scapegoat, n. (O.T.) goat allowed to escape when Jewish chief priest had laid sins of people upon it.; person bearing blame due to others. - The Concise Oxford Dictionary Scapegoat n. one who is given all the blame or punishment for faults of which he is innocent..... - The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English In Biblical times, one of the two goats upon which the sins of the entire Jewish people during the year just ended were loaded by the high priest in a symbolic ceremony on the Day of Atonement; the two goats were led forth or sent out into the wilderness to die and thus bring expiation for those sins. - Dictionary of Mysticism, ed. by Frank Gaynor, 1953 scapegoat - Scape is an archaic form of escape, the goat the animal upon whom, in the ancient Hebraic practice, the accumulated sins of the people were placed on Atonement Day. The goat thus symbolically burdened was then driven into the wild. Hence, scapegoating is the act of blaming a convenient (but innocent, as was the goat) person or group for one's own frustrations, grievances, guilts, etc. this phenomenon is found as a defense mechanism in individuals as well as a deliberate form of propaganda in governments. - The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology
Scapegoating is a hostile social - psychological discrediting routine by which people move blame and responsibility away from themselves and towards a target person or group. It is also a practice by which angry feelings and feelings of hostility may be projected, via inappropriate accusation, towards others. The target feels wrongly persecuted and receives misplaced vilification, blame and criticism; he is likely to suffer rejection from those who the perpetrator seeks to influence. Scapegoating has a wide range of focus: from "approved" enemies of very large groups of people down to the scapegoating of individuals by other individuals. Distortion is always a feature.
