SCAPEGOAT

[noun] [C] - a person who is blamed for something that someone else has doneThe captain became a scapegoat for the team's failure to win the cup that year.His friends made a scapegoat of him because they knew that he wouldn't dare tell on them.Workers are often made into/used as scapegoats for the failures of management.The party began searching for scapegoats immediately after their election defeat.Instead of looking for scapegoats for what went wrong, we should be trying to prevent it happening again.