scapegoat

Concise Oxford English Dictionary © 2008 Oxford University Press:
scapegoat/ˈskeɪpɡəʊt/

▶noun

• 1 a person who is blamed for the wrongdoings or mistakes of others.

• 2 (in the Bible) a goat sent into the wilderness after the Jewish chief priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people upon it (Lev. 16).

▶verb make a scapegoat of.

– origin C16: from archaic scape ‘escape’ + goat.