Missing White Woman Syndrome

For Cheryl Jenkins Jackson, whose support of the cause of missing minorities is unyielding.

It is a sad fact that if you go missing in this country, your chances of garnering national media coverage are greatly enhanced if you are a white woman. Throw in blonde and pretty and you're damn near an iron clad cinch to end up on Nancy Grace's show every night for weeks--if not months--to come.

There is even a name for this phenomena. It's called "Missing White Woman Syndrome," or "Missing Pretty Girl Syndrome." It is defined on wikipedia as: a vernacular term for the alleged disproportionately greater degree of coverage in television, radio, newspaper and magazine reporting of a misfortune, most often a missing person case, involving a young, attractive, white, middle-class (or above) woman, compared with cases concerning a missing male, or missing persons of other ethnicities or economic classes.

I would remove the word alleged from that definition. Here are some interesting statistics based around missing person reports:

--On average, 2300 people are reported missing everyday in the United States. That amounts to a whopping 840,000 per year. All but about 50,000 are juveniles.

--Of that 50,000, about 40% are white, 30% are black, 20% are Latino, and slightly better than half are male.

When you look at those numbers and then relate them to the national news coverage given to missing persons, it's clear that this "syndrome" is not alleged at all. It is a painful fact.

Just think of the most well covered missing persons cases in recent years:

--Chandra Levy in 2001. Sure, her case involved an extramarital affair with then U.S. Representative (CA), Gary Condit (whose career was ruined despite not being a suspect), but did you also know that an Asian woman named Joyce Chiang went missing around the same time and Levy's alleged killer is the prime suspect in that case as well? I'm sure you didn't.

--Laci Peterson also in 2002. Peterson was murdered by her husband while 7 and a half months pregnant. The body of the fetus washed ashore in the San Francisco Bay separately from the mother. The ensuing media drama coupled with the Smart case probably made Nancy Grace's career.

--Natalee Holloway in 2004. Perhaps the mother of all ongoing missing persons cases. Holloway disappeared while vacationing in Aruba and was last seen with Dutch citizen, Joran van der Sloot. The case was widely covered by all major media networks, and has recently been back in the news due to van der Sloot's alleged murder of a second female victim in Peru.

Besides being women, these ladies all had three other things in common: They were all white and pretty, and their families worked tirelessly to keep the case in the news. On that last score, I don't blame their parents and relatives one bit. The personal horror of having your loved one go missing has to be amongst the worst of all maladies. I happen to be married to a pretty blonde girl and if (God forbid) she ever disappeared, I would use every tool in the box to bring her home.

That being said, can anyone recall a case of a missing minority of any age that has received anywhere near the same amount of coverage? I can't think of a single one. Hell, even the so called "Amber Alert" was named after a little white girl. Now to be fair, most missing children are indeed caucasian females. And anytime a child goes missing, I am for pulling out all the stops to bring them home. However, I question if minorities get the same full court press that white children get.

Think of the two most famous missing children cases involving children from recent years:

--Elizabeth Smart in 2002. Abducted from her Salt Lake City home by two degenerates, Smart's case became a cause celeb for the nine plus months that she went missing until her rescue in March of 2003.

--Caylee Anthony in 2005. Anthony's body was later recovered in August of the same year and her mother was arrested soon after and the prosecutor's office is seeking the death penalty.

Is there even a comparable case involving a minority child? Unfortunately, that isn't even the right question to ask. The real conundrum is why? Why do we seem to value the lives of attractive white girls above all else? It's not like people of black, brown, or Asian persuasion never disappear. Do we simply value the lives of the attractive white female above all others? And worse yet, how do you answer "no" to that last question? What evidence can you provide to support a contrary thesis? Again, I'm stumped.

I do however think that you can pin point the biased media coverage back to a single event, the death of Jonbenet Ramsey. For those that don't remember, the six year old Ramsey was discovered murdered in the basement of her family home in 1996. Due in part to the odd behavior of her parents and the child's involvement in beauty pageants (why is this a good idea?), the story was all the rage for years. The inability to bring the case to trial played a large part in the drawn out nature of the media coverage as well. While many suspected both the mother and father of foul play, the murder site was so contaminated that no prosecutorial consensus could be reached. To this day, the case remains unsolved.

While the murder of Jonbenet remains unresolved, what is clear is that her case created a whole sea change in the way these cases are reported. Missing White Woman Syndrome became very good for ratings. Think of the amount of coverage that established news organizations like CNN has spent over the last 15 years covering these incidents. While major events have been going on in the world, there has always been plenty of time to cover the case of a pretty missing blonde girl. It's so bad now, that they don't even need to be missing, they can just be screwed up (see Anna Nicole Smith). At times it can be difficult to tell the difference between CNN and Entertainment Tonight. In fact, the CNN owned Court TV (now Tru TV), probably owes it's entire success to the "Syndrome."

But if this is the new reality, then fine. If we need to cover every missing person case with a frenzy that puts the tabloids to shame then I will accept with one caveat: If only on occasion, can we please make black the new blonde?

Sumo-Pop
June 25, 2010