victimages

Noun

victimage (countable and uncountable, plural victimages)

1. The state of being a victim.
   • It was a source of murmuring discontent to her, in the first years of an intelligent girlhood, to feel how entirely they (for it was always 'they' in her thought) had been shut out from the fairer social world, the victims of she scarcely knew what, but helpless in that victimage, and utterly weak...1851 October, Caroline Chesebro, “Hearts of Oak”, in Knickerbocker, Or, New-York Monthly Magazine, volume 38, page 399
2. The act of scapegoating a person or group in order to avoid societal guilt.
   • What is so terrible about victimage is that, invariably, one man's guilt, or a group's guilt, results in some other person's or persons' injury or death.1983, William H. Rueckert, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations, page 151