“Missing White Woman Syndrome” is a term that was created by Gwen Ifill. This term was coined to describe the phenomenon of the media’s extensive (and obsessive) coverage of white, upper-middle-class women and girls who have gone missing. “Missing White Woman Syndrome” comes from white supremacist, patriarchal beliefs about feminism. Meaning that white, blonde, attractive, upper middle class women who have gone missing are deemed as more important because that is what society has always been taught and believed. It’s no secret that WOC and POC are often overlooked or not shown as much on national television when it comes to their missing cases. After the missing case of Gabby Petito that has been on every news outlet, this phenomena of MWS was made aware. How come we all know about Laci Peterson, Natalee Holloway and Chandra Levy? Did anyone know the same time Laci Peterson was missing, Evelyn Hernandez (WOC) of San Francisco who was also pregnant was missing too? Did anyone know that around the same time Gabby Petito was missing Deirdre Reid was missing as well? No news coverage is especially true for indigenous women. Over 700 indigenous women from 2000-2020 were missing in Wyoming where Gabby Petito’s body was found. Hardly any of them got any news coverage. Think about this. Name 5 WOC that have gone missing and think about if you have seen mass news coverage on their disappearances.
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://scholar.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=7586&context=jclc
This article above talks about how White Women’s disappearances are given disproportionate attention and news coverage. This article also talks about how different racial groups are misrepresented in news coverage, as well as women. They also go into depth about how the media and society both intersect on what is shown about missing women’s cases.
The article you posted is really interesting. People of color really do get overlooked, and that is really sad to think about.
Yes, thank you for this. I appreciate the article’s application of the terms by the sociologist Edwardo Bonillo-Silva, who describes how a white person gets viewed as a “universal human.”
The research shows that there really is less news coverage by race, giving us more evidence of the need for an intersectional approach.
Now that some news media outlets are actually covering MWWS as a story, could this be a tipping point in changing the patterns?
Also, what does it say about the value of women, and how the larger society views some women more valuable than others? It is not that there is no misogyny against white women; in a way it is a reproduction of the old “damsel in distress” trope that we used to see in old movies and cartoons.