"My friend heard the track. He didn't hear the van." "My friend saw the text. He didn't see the truck." "55 teenagers a week wish they'd given the road their full attention." Catch the dead eyes of one of the youths staring out of Transport for London's road safety posters and Boris Johnson's attempts to blame cyclists for a horrifying fortnight that has seen six people knocked off their bicycles and killed in the capital seem less surprising. The practice of blaming victims of road crashes is not new. The idea that listening to headphones or looking at your phone while crossing the road is, frankly, asking to be crushed by several tons of fast-moving metal, has been plastered across bus shelters for years.

Last week, a few hours after a man was killed in Whitechapel following a collision with a bus, the London mayor highlighted cyclists' "risky" behaviour such as "jumping red lights". Yesterday, after a sixth death, Johnson said he would consider banning headphones, while the policeman in charge of traffic enforcement in London, DCS Glyn Jones, had cyclists without helmets stopped by police, saying, "the more vulnerable you are, the more careful you need to be". According to this logic the five-year-old child killed outside his primary school on St George's Road in south London a year ago – and whose father showed me the carrier bag that held the clothes he died in – should have been paying more attention than the drivers whizzing by on a three-lane red route at 3.30pm.

People make mistakes, of course we do – in cars, on bicycles, on foot. The point of road design and traffic engineering is to make our mistakes less dangerous. For those in charge of London transport to suggest publicly and before investigations have been carried out that any of those killed in the last fortnight were in any way responsible for their own deaths is unforgivable. But is it perhaps the logical yet panic-driven extension of a mindset that sees the vulnerable victims of road crashes in general – among whom children and older pedestrians have always been over-represented – as somehow responsible for their own susceptibility?

Look up victim-blaming and you'll see the phrase was coined in 1971 by US sociologist William Ryan. His book Blaming the Victim was a riposte to another book that argued that the breakdown of the African-American family was responsible for many of the woes afflicting black Americans. No, said Ryan. This was victim-blaming, or, "justifying inequality by finding defects in the victims".

To a young feminist in 1980s Britain, the most notorious victim-blamers were the judges who blamed female victims of domestic violence for "nagging". Husbands who killed such wives were treated leniently under a defence of "provocation". Women who murdered husbands received far harsher sentences, and feminists fought a decades-long battle for changes to the law.

Victim-blaming by the male-dominated police and legal profession hasn't gone away. The tendency to distrust victims of rape and other sexual offences is well known, and a major reason for the shockingly low conviction rate. Just a few weeks ago it was announced that the barrister Robert Colover would no longer undertake prosecutions involving serious sexual offences cases after he used the word "predatory" to describe a 13-year-old victim of abuse in court.

But is it useful to connect the women lambasted for "risky" behaviour such as getting drunk, wearing tiny skirts or walking the streets after dark, with the cyclists attacked for "risky" behaviour such as not wearing a helmet and fluorescent jacket, or cycling without lights? Or to link both to other examples of (relatively) powerless groups accused of authoring their own failure, such as the poor and obese blamed for eating the wrong food? Or the black state school pupils who choose not to apply to Oxbridge?

I think so. Victim-blaming is a useful concept, because it helps us see that what happens when a victim is blamed is that a culprit – whether an individual, institution, or set of practices – is let off. Why so many people, including women and cyclists, collude in this is not mysterious: it is so much more comfortable to think that the poor bloke killed on his bike last week was an idiot; that the teenage girl gang-raped at a party was a slut. So much more comfortable not to focus on the fact that, if you drive a machine made of a ton of metal down the road, banging into a person and killing them is an occupational hazard.