Missing white woman syndrome

Supporters of the phenomenon posit that it encompasses supposed disproportionate media attention to females who are young, attractive, white, and upper middle class.

The study found that female victims receive more coverage overall, and national and out-of-state attention is even more skewed towards representing women.

[12] The phenomenon has led to a number of tough-on-crime measures, mainly on the political right, that were named for white women who disappeared and were subsequently found harmed.

[13][14] In addition to race and class, factors such as supposed attractiveness, body size, and youthfulness have been identified as unfair criteria in the determination of newsworthiness in coverage of missing women.

[16] American news anchor Gwen Ifill is credited with originating the phrase at the Unity: Journalists of Color journalism conference in 2004.

[1] In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle published an article detailing the disparity between the coverage of the Laci Peterson case, and that of Evelyn Hernandez, a Hispanic woman – both of whom disappeared in 2002.

[24] A 2013 study that addressed media coverage of missing children, focusing on sex, but not race, found that "the results revealed that gender and age play only a minor role in deciding which abduction incidents are covered by newspapers, as well as the extent to which they are reported on.

[1] Other observers note the lack of publicity given to black female victims of police brutality in news coverage, attributing the silence to a tradition of "sexism and patriarchy" in American society.

[1] Kym Pasqualini, president of the National Center for Missing Adults, observed that media outlets tend to focus on "damsels in distress"—typically, affluent young white women and teenagers.

[28] In a 2016 Esquire article about the disappearance of Tiffany Whitton, journalist Tom Junod observed that white women of lower social status, such as Whitton, a 26-year-old unemployed drug addict who was on parole, do not get much media attention, as "media outlets are ruthlessly selective, and they tend to prefer women who are white, pretty, and, above all, innocent".

Her mother stated that producers of shows like Nancy Grace told her they weren't interested in her daughter's case.

[29] Dr. Cory L. Armstrong wrote in The Washington Post: "The pattern of choosing only young, white, middle-class women for the full damsel treatment says a lot about a nation that likes to believe it has consigned race and class to irrelevance.

[37] Additionally, in its 2019 Uniform Crime Report, the FBI found that 54.7% of murder victims in the United States for whom their race was known were black and that 78.3% for whom their sex was known were male,[38] while approximately 14% of the U.S. population as a whole was black in the Census Bureau's 2019 American Community Survey and the Census Bureau estimated that the U.S. population retained the female majority in its sex ratio.

[43] In January 2006, the London Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Ian Blair, accused the media of institutional racism in its reporting of murders.

Even when Damilola's father flew into the UK from Nigeria to make press statements and television appearances, the level of public outcry did not, Jewkes asserts, reach "the near hysterical outpourings of anger and sadness that accompanied the deaths of Sarah, Milly, Holly, and Jessica".

[51] Sandile Memela, chief director for social cohesion at South Africa's Department of Arts and Culture, noted amidst the Oscar Pistorius trial that there existed substantial differences between how media outlets reported on the murders of Reeva Steenkamp and Zanele Khumalo; two South African models, respectively white and black, who had been murdered by their boyfriends under nearly identical circumstances.

[52] Memela asserted that the discrepancy between the media coverage of the Steenkamp and Khumala murders amounted to "structural racism" within South African society, and stated: "As a country we seem to have chosen to ignore the agony, pain and suffering of the Khumalo family for no other reason than that they are black.

A Romani rights activist commented on the case to say "imagine if the situation were reversed and the children were brown and the parents were white".