One of our white women is missing

Exploring the missing white woman syndrome

The sad story of Gabby Petito, who went missing Sept. 11, might be winding down as human remains consistent with the Florida woman’s description are thisclose to being identified as hers.

Along with the story of her, then there was much media discussion about the fiancé, who’d returned to Florida after a cross-country trip with the van in which the couple traveled, only he returned without Petito. The FBI searched his family home on Monday. What did he know? Why wasn’t he talking?

Here’s a timeline helpfully supplied by CNN to keep you abreast.

This post is in no way meant to dismiss or diminish the pain of a family from whom a loved one is missing, but the coverage of Petito’s disappearance reads like the latest chapter of our ongoing book, “One of Our White Women Is Missing,” where the press once again gives inordinate attention to a white woman’s whereabouts, while the stories of missing women of other races and ethnicities go untold. According to Insider, 710 indigenous people were reported missing in the last 10 years, all in Wyoming, the same state in which Petito disappeared. Most of those missing were girls. From what I can glean, none of them have received national coverage. In fact, two other people who were reported missing in the Grand Teton area this summer, and those two are also not on CNN.

The phrase “missing white woman syndrome” was coined by journalism great Gwen Ifill, who died in 2016, to define the media’s sometimes excessive coverage of upper middle class white women who disappear. A recent list of them includes — but is not limited to:

• Polly Klass

• JonBenét Ramsey (unusual, because she was a child)

• Chandra Levy

• Elizabeth Smart

• Laci Peterson

• Natalee Holloway

• Caylee Anthony

This is not new. I’m old enough to remember Natalee Holloway, the Alabama teen who disappeared on a 2005 class trip to Aruba. The national media could not set the story down. I also remember Laci Scott, whose husband Scott was convicted of murdering her in 2002.

This 2007 study took an academic look in the publication, Gender and Development, and asks the question: “When it comes to body count, which bodies ‘count?’ The study said the phenomenon is not unique to the U.S., and it said that the news blackout can include missing white women who are also sex workers, whose bodies also don’t “count.”

Robert Lowery, who leads the National Center for Missing And Exploited Children, told ABC News:

About 60% of the reports that we see here in the U.S. that go in those databases are people of color. I think it really breaks a lot of commonly held thoughts on who are really the missing children in the U.S.

Only about a fifth of those cases of missing people of color are covered by the mainstream media, according to the Journal Criminal Law and Criminology. That study, by Zach Sommers, divided media attention into two streams:

(1) disparities in the threshold issue of whether a missing person receives any media attention at all; and (2) disparities in coverage intensity among the missing persons that do appear in the news.

Some of the disparity is pure-D racism, as in deciding that white female bodies matter more than other bodies, when it comes to sensational news coverage. Some of that disparity is sexism, a whole-hearted acceptance of stories about a damsel in distress — the acceptance of which reinforces a dangerous stereotype.

When you don’t hear the stories, you don’t know the stories. When you don’t see your own story in the media, you can start to think your body doesn’t count. This isn’t rocket science, and it never has been.