To ask why the media seems so fixated on missing white women?

[TheGreyShark]

It feels like every time a woman goes missing, the amount of media coverage she gets depends heavily on her race. When a young, attractive white woman disappears, it’s headline news, with rolling updates, public concern and extensive investigations. Meanwhile, countless missing women of colour - many from vulnerable backgrounds - barely get a mention.

Of course, every missing person case is tragic but the disparity in coverage is glaring. Is it just about what gets views or is there a deeper bias at play?

AIBU to think the media has an obvious preference when it comes to whose stories get told?

I agree with @SipandClean DH and I comment on it all the time. It’s not just black women either, it’s all the other minority groups.

I think it’s a good thing that lots of different groups are represented but it needs to be representative of real life. Thats where I do this 🙄 🙄

Title is in very poor taste OP.

I get what you’re saying but this comes across as cruel towards those women.

I concur that the coverage should be for all women.

It is well documented phenomenon and steeped in racism. I know this is a story about the phenomenon in America, but it applies here, too, to a degree: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/29/the-missing-white-woman-syndrome-still-plagues-america#:~:text=This%20disparity%20is%20real.,more%20intensely%2C%20than%20everyone%20else.

I think it’s the same when children are the victims of crime.

You can’t really say that definitively as don’t know the numbers of people who went missing by race who went missing. White people made up 74% of the population of England and Wales in the last census. Black individuals made up 14% of the missing persons cases in 2019/20, yet were only 3% of the population.

Media is very London centric and white British make up 37% of the London demographic, so you would probably expect more of a mix than you would in the rest of the UK.

Could it be because statistically, people from this demographic are rarely go missing vs other demographics (men / non-white / non-middle class), ie higher chance of being a victim of an attack?

Are you being intentionally ignorant or does it just come naturally?

It’s the same with kids…”pretty little white girl syndrome” I believe it’s called.

Yes. Lorraine Ridout. Halima Elmi. Naheed Khan. Maya Patel. Loan Nguyen. Monalisa Zodetsa. Kadia Diane.

And many more. None of whom have garnered anything like the media coverage of Claudia Lawrence or Nicola Bulley. There is massive inequality in how women of colour are covered by the media and investigated by the police. If you don't see it, it's because you don't want to see it.

As if you needed to out yourself more. This is such a dog whistle. A quick Google search shows it to be 19% of adverts have a person from the global majority in up from 5% in 2015.

It's very, very true. I remember when an attractive young woman went missing (can't remember her name. It was the poor woman who was killed by her neighbour, somewhere like Bristol a few ago. She was young, attractive, blonde, middle class). Obviously it was a tragic and upsetting case. I remember reading that the same weekend other people had gone missing and been found murdered - black women, men. These cases didn't make national news and barely even had a couple of lines in local news.

Class has a lot to do with it too. There have been serial killings of prostitutes over several decades that didn't get much coverage until a woman who "wasn't a prostitute" got killed. It is about grabbing headlines. MSM in the UK is pretty selective and variably inaccurate across many topics. It is even worse in America.

That’s why she’s asking. How can you give examples if you don’t know they’re missing? 🤦‍♀️

I think it's more about class than race. The white women that get the most attention are predominantly from very middle class backgrounds, the sort of women where if they go missing it's highly out of character. The sort of women that live in leafy villages and small towns, in nice houses with a husband and family, or younger well educated women and teens like Claudia Lawrence with fairly well off and respected parents.

People from ethnic minorities in the UK who are also of such middle class backgrounds are far fewer.

When someone from a much poorer background goes missing then there is more chance that there is a different explanation to their whereabouts than an abduction or murder by a stranger. If you have a chaotic lifestyle then your disappearance is likely to be less mysterious and less out of character for that person.

Yes - including white women from the working class. Or those coming from less than perfect homes. 🙄

I hate reading about missing women as you just want them to be safe. So obviously I'm biased towards women 😳

Not race though. Women are more likely to be attacked in a life threatening way.

Exactly this. In the past, ‘missing white woman syndrome’ may have been caused by racism. But nowadays, it’s caused by user demand and data. Media organisations know exactly how much demand there is for a particular type of content based on the number of clicks, shares, likes & responses it gets. Revenue follows clicks, so that incentivises them to produce more & more of the same.

The most obvious case of this in the UK in recent times was the tragic disappearance of Nicola Bulley, an attractive young-ish middle class blonde woman. People go missing all the time, but this particular case created a huge media circus. Why? Because people kept on clicking.

They definitely don’t.

I remember years ago the Irish women killed in Melbourne, Australia.

Her killer had a history of of violence against sex workers but because they were sex workers it was never dealt with seriously. Like they were somehow “less than” due to their profession.

I never heard of the Pakistan school
shooting but I was not in the UK then. But dooesn’t that same something that it needed 250 deaths to make the news?

But that was not my point. More aimed at the person who seemed to suggest we focus on local news which is why Iraq school attacks would not be reported here but the Stockport murders probably were not reported in Iraq. But we get US news though which I think is in live with what the OP is suggesting.

They kind of do according to a Channel 4/YouGov study from 2019.

37% of TV ads feature black people vs 3% of population

12% South Asian vs 7% of population

8% East Asian vs 1% of population

I think people get overwhelmed by mass murders so a single missing/murder is easier to process

Yep I don’t get how the data can be challenged. It’s just the data.

The reasons why are always interesting though.

I know you did not mean it but I first read your post as saying more black women die during pregnancy or under a Labour government and thought “Starmer really is useless he!”

😂