Final answer:
Blaming the victim is a form of sociological theory related to victim blaming, where victims are held responsible for their suffering, often due to societal pressures and dominant group biases. Option 3.
Step-by-step explanation:
The concept of blaming the victim can be understood as a form of victim blaming where the victim of a crime or misfortune is held responsible for their own suffering.
This concept is associated with a sociological theory which sheds light on how societal pressures and dominant group prejudices lead to the misattribution of fault onto victims. For instance, scapegoat theory, an extension of frustration-aggression theory, proposes that dominant groups often displace their aggression onto subordinate groups.
This behavior was historically evident when Adolf Hitler blamed Jews for Germany's problems, or when immigrants are held responsible for various social issues in the United States.
The Denial of the Victim and the Denial of Responsibility are techniques where an individual justifies their actions by negating the harm done to the victim or by shifting the blame onto others, such as attributing personal financial struggles to an employer's failure to provide adequate compensation.
Conversely, victimless crimes represent a situation where actions that are technically illegal, like underage drinking or prostitution, are perceived as not harming others directly, although they may have societal implications.
The concept also relates to the attribution theory, where dispositional explanations (like laziness or desire for government support) are often inaccurately applied to individuals living in poverty, ignoring the situational factors like unemployment rates or lack of educational opportunities that contribute to their circumstances.
This is often driven by the just-world hypothesis, where individuals believe that the world is inherently fair, leading them to rationalize away the suffering of others by blaming the victims themselves for their plight.
So option 3 is correct.