These didn't just make up the accusations for the fun of it. There are those who make false accusations for a political or ideological reason: "I'll scrawl a racist message because it's truthy and I know they want to."
No, in this case making up "we're victims" was their defense, their way of escaping an accusation. "We're victims, so we are innocent of this other thing."
And it's a common pattern.
"Why are you doing this?" "Look at him!" (He's doing something, some I'm entitled to do it, too, leave me alone).
"Why are you doing this?" "I'm not! He started it, and so he's responsible for my actions." (Ducking responsibility, leave me alone.)
"Why are you doing this?" "Why are you bothering me? You're wrong, not me!" (The best defensive is a good offensiveness, leave me alone.)
Kids are trained to do these at an early age. And it's often easier, given fault lines in US society, to leave them alone. In so doing, though, we reward them and encourage them to continue to use these tactics.
However, if you don't agree to that particular social contract, it means that those who really are innocent, when they use one of these tactics, are automatically assumed to be acting on a sense of entitlement, responsibility ducking, or being offensive just to make the enforcer leave them alone.
If you do punish somebody who uses these tactics, typically the tactic has no downside: They get punished the same for dodging and whining as for simple denial as for confession, but the whining is the more winning of the strategies. So we see more and more of it and will continue to see more and more of it until we stop rewarding it.
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