I think the issue here is that the term victim blaming is not a simple sum of the meanings of victim and blaming. It's become something of an idiom. As the pare

I think the issue here is that the term victim blaming is not a simple sum of the meanings of victim and blaming. It's become something of an idiom. As the parent said, when someone cites "victim blaming" they're nearly always talking about situations where there's a clear victim and clear perpetrator (even if the perpetrator hasn't been identified), yet people claim the victim is largely at fault because they should have better protected themselves. I don't often hear the term used in cases of child abuse; or, when I do, it's a response to people claiming that the child shouldn't have been so annoying or provocative. I think most people would agree that discrediting or ignoring child abuse complaints is a separate issue that's not what people mean when they say victim blaming. In the case of the cancer lab, I would say this is a third type of scenario where people suspect the victim. In fact no one actually blamed the victim--merely suspected them--and everyone went forward with the investigation and eventually arrived at the truth. (Saying it's blaming because they're thought to be to blame is a conflation of idioms, in my opinion.) Once again, this definitely isn't what most people mean when they say victim blaming, not just because the victim was never blamed but because of the specific meaning we already talked about. It's totally okay to use the words for their definitions instead of going with what most people think the terms mean--that's your right. Just know that if you use the term like that, you're probably going to confuse people. Because victim blaming is a hot-button issue right now, it might start some pointless arguments that could be avoided by using different semantics. For what it's worth, I think it's okay to doubt, so long as you still follow through with the investigation. I'd say even in the cases of child abuse the issue is that no one bothers to find out the truth--not that they initially doubt the children. Clearly the victim could be lying or they could be telling the truth, and your personal estimation of those probabilities are based on all kinds of things. What matters is that you come to the correct conclusion in the end. Unfortunately, people often don't bother to investigate at all because it's messy and inconvenient.