Delko: "Blonde girl's missing and the National Guard turns out to help. Hispanic girl, no one gives a damn."
Calleigh: "I think there are a lot of people here."
Delko: "Oh, come on, Calleigh. You saw the media's response to Lana Walker. You know? Where were the yellow ribbons for Consuela Valdez? The recovery center? It's the same song, you know? You want any real attention in this world, you got to have blonde hair and blue eyes. No offense."
A term for when media coverage ratchets up to follow the murder, kidnapping, or disappearance of - you guessed it - white women, often pretty and young.
The origin of the term is unclear. Although Professor Sheri Parks of the University of Maryland claims to have coined it circa 2005, it apparently has been in use among journalists (and FARK.com) for years before that. It's also been referred to as "missing pretty girl syndrome" and "damsel in distress syndrome". Although it appears to be a primarily American phenomenon, a similar coverage bias is reported to exist in the United Kingdom, and some people believe Canada and Australia have a similar disinterest in the fate of their own missing minority persons—and (in Canada, at least) disenfranchised in general; this is how Robert Pickton was able to get away with killing over fifty Vancouver prostitutes.
Ironically, before The Eighties or so, it was almost impossible to get the police (let alone the media) interested in a missing person unless he was white, rich, male, and over 30. It was assumed that any woman under 40 who disappeared had either run away or had gone to have a dirty weekend somewhere. There are even documented cases of police officers throwing out missing persons reports the moment families left the station house.
The most likely ignored missing person is the Disposable Sex Worker and/or the Disposable Vagrant. Presumably the inspiration for the Trope is the White Knighting mind-set. For more information, including a detailed breakdown of the coverage cycle and links to dozens of cases, see this article at Wikipedia. This column at CNN.com has some thoughts on it, and in the years since this trope entry was first written many more writers have weighed in on the topic.
Compare If It Bleeds, It Leads, Local Angle.
Examples:
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Comic Books
Briefly referenced in the Confessor arc of Kurt Busiek's Astro City, when a series of ritualistic killings becomes worthy of a public panic only after an archetypal blonde school sweetheart type becomes one of the victims.
Comic Strips
Prickly City: Winslow comments that Kevin's disappearance is getting a lot of attention considering he's not blond. (Mind you, he's a Senator.)
Film
Parodied in Scary Movie when Cindy Campbell sends a message to the police saying "White woman in trouble!" The next shot is of the house surrounded by police crews.
In the third movie:
Brenda: Oh come on. Cindy, the news is on! Another little white girl fell down a well! Fifty black people got their ass beat by the police today, but the whole world gotta stop for one little whitey down a hole!
Used in Gone Baby Gone. The kidnapping of an adorable little blonde girl gets huge media coverage. When a little Hispanic boy is kidnapped by a pedophile two months later and brutally raped to death, nobody really cares until it's all over.
Lampshaded in LA Confidential when Inez Soto ties the men who kidnapped, brutalized, and raped her to the murders of white people at the Nite Owl diner, because otherwise nobody in 1950s Los Angeles would care about getting justice for a Mexican immigrant.
Helen Lyle: "Yeah, but y'know what bugs me about the whole thing? Two people get brutally murdered and the cops do nothing, whereas a white woman goes in there and gets attacked and they lock the place down."
Invoked in Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay when a corrupt, racist federal agent motivates his team by showing them a picture of a young white girl, saying that she could be captured and raped by terrorists.
An example from Primeval, Olando Jones points out that the Crocodile is just like OJ, eaten up bunch of Africans, no one gives a fuck, kills one white lady, and they send the news crew.
In Gridlock'd, the strange amalgamation of Tupac Shakur and Tim Roth in a drug addicted ghetto setting, an early scene involves their female friend overdosing. Tupac calls the ambulance, and gets hung up upon when they hear his voice. When he calls again, he says something along the lines of "there's a white woman hurt and a bunch of black guys smashing cars and yelling about the revolution!"
Literature
This Trope may have its roots in the 17th Century captivity narratives written by Mary Rowlandson, making this one Older Than Radio.
In the novel Reliquary, the string of kidnappings in New York garners media attention only after a pretty young blonde woman vanishes.
A central theme of the novel The Black Dahlia and the real-life unsolved murder case on which it is partly based.
In Pop Goes the Weasel, one of the Alex Cross series of detective novels, a Dangerously Genre SavvySerial Killer is estimated to have possibly killed more than 100 people throughout Washington, D.C. A big part of his winning strategy was to only kill women who were black, poor, prostitutes, or otherwise people the media and police wouldn't care about.
America (The Book) gives us this handy little formula: "y = Family Income * (Abductee Cuteness/Skin Color)^2 + Length of Abduction * Media Savvy of Grieving Parents^3 (Where y = minutes of coverage)".
The absence of this trope is probably what makes the Janie series (1990-2000) an Unintentional Period Piece (among other things). If Janie's kidnapping had happened now, no doubt there would have been a huge media sensation about the disappearance of a pretty white girl from the suburbs.
Live Action TV
In fiction, writers tend to be more savvy and aware of the use of this trope...
Averted entirely in season 1 episode of Lincoln Heights, "Abduction" where Lizzie is kidnapped. the local media and police give their full support to the black family. While it could be due to Lizzie's father being a respected police officer that the police are so supportive, the issue of race never becomes a factor.
Addressed in the Without a Trace episode "White Balance", in which the agents investigated two cases — that of a white slacker party-loving teenage girl, and that of a black hard working kind teenage boy. They must cope with the white girl's case getting constant attention and the black boy's getting none, in one instant the news interviewer left just after finishing up with the father of the white girl, completely ignoring the black boy's mother. This episode concludes with a No Ending — we're told one lives and one dies, but not who.
In another Without A Trace episode, Jack confronts his new boss for focusing on a child kidnapping case at the expense of the disappearance of a lesbian case worker...which is Fridge Logic in itself, as there is a chance the case worker just walked away while the kid is definitively in danger.
Another episode had Jack insist on taking the case of a missing black foster child, telling his foster father that despite the lack of evidence of foul play, his case would grow cold in the hands of the local authorities.
Brought up in Veronica Mars when Weevil mentions that shortly after the murder of Lilly Kane, a little girl from his neighborhood named Marisol Reyes disappeared, but she didn't warrant the same amount of media coverage or therapy sessions for the students. (Weevil was fogging the issue, not wanting to bring up his own affair with Lilly. At the same time, Lilly was the daughter of a minor celebrity. Also, Reyes simply disappeared, whereas Lilly was brutally murdered.)
Notable because due to the nature of the show, the point of Weevil's tirade was ignored on the fanbase, who thought that the introduction of the Reyes case was going to be an important part of the Kane case. It wasn't. Also, there were Unfortunate Implications since Keith would've been sheriff at that point.
Horatio Caine moaned about it in an episode of CSI: Miami, telling a reporter to cover the missing (non-white) girl they're looking for that week.
Also the page quote, in an episode in which a young, blonde white girl and a dark Hispanic girl are kidnapped by the same man in a very short space of time; the former, of course, gets loads of coverage.
Discussed (specifically the Natalee Holloway case) in Season 4 of The Wire when McNulty and Freamon suggest that the lack of support from their bosses in solving more than twenty murders is due to the victims being poor and black, leading to the episode's epitaph — "This ain't Aruba, bitch."
McNulty then partially invokes this trope by staging dead white homeless men*
They died of natural or OD-related causes
to suggest a serial killer is targeting them. Then double-invoked when Scott Templeton starts capitalizing on this to win himself a Pulitzer Prize.
In an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the disappearance of a white girl on a school trip becomes the subject of a media frenzy and is eventually tied to the disappearance of a local black girl. The mother of the black girl excoriates a Nancy Grace knock-off for coming to her only when her daughter's disappearance was tied up with the white girl's.
Similarly, the black cop Tutuola in Law & Order: SVU dispelled a crowd of nearly-violent protesters arguing just this by saying that he knew exactly how it was...and that he was going to make sure the black girl victim would get the justice she deserved.
In another episode, a young man decides that the only way to get the police to actually work on solving his little brother's kidnapping is to have a pretty blonde girl kidnapped. The only way he'll help them locate the girl is if they find out what happened to his brother. This episode hits particularly hard once you know that the blonde (supposed) kidnapped girl was a friend of his that accepted to pretend to be kidnapped because she was aware of this trope.
Brought up in Boston Legal when after Denise's Hispanic housekeeper's son is abducted, she goes to Brad for help and points out that since the child is Hispanic, it's not like the media will be all over the case.
In Homicide: Life on the Street, the murder of Adena Watson, a black girl, is subject to a major police "redball" investigation and creates a media frenzy and was based on a Real Life case which resulted in the same, so it may be an aversion. Of course, Baltimore (where both fictional and real-life murders took place) is notable for having a particularly large majority African-American population, which may explain it.
An episode of Criminal Minds featured two serial killers in the same city, one targeting middle-class white women, the other shooting hookers. The police don't even realize the second exists until he gets annoyed and contacts a reporter.
Another episode featured a serial killer taking out homeless people, prostitutes, and other such generally-ignored people. Like the real-life Robert Pickton case, most of the authorities are convinced there's really nothing happening.
Yet another episode had a number of black teenage girls being killed, with all the murders looking like hate crimes. The authorities are accused of being apathetic towards the murders, due to a bit of unfortunate timing — the BAU were called after the third girl was killed...alongside her white, seemingly well-off ex-boyfriend.
The Suspect Behavior spin-off has this happen in the first episode, complete with the hysterical mother of a black little girl whose kidnapping was ignored. It turns out that the kidnapper has taken a lot of children without being caught because he's really fixated on eight year old black girls, and the only way they get both girls back safely is by bucking the media and local cops, and working the black girl's case.
Castle features the example of a white woman who disappeared, and the investigating officer in her case assumed she'd just run off to indulge a latent drug habit and couldn't really be bothered following it up. Turned out her husband murdered her. Needless to say, her family had some resentments towards the police.
Everybody Hates Chris played with this, with a joke in the episode revolving around how if you wanted the police to make an active effort to find your missing children, you couldn't say they were black. (Unfortunately...)
Rochelle (on the phone): "Yes, hello! I'd like to report two missing boys."
Police: "Can you describe them, please?"
Rochelle (quickly): "They're white."
(knock at the door)
Rochelle: "Hold on." (opens door)
Policeman At Door: "Ma'am, you reported two missing white boys?"
Rochelle: "Damn!"
Lie to Me had the case of a missing white girl eventually connected with a black girl whose case didn't receive much attention on account of this trope.
Vanished hung a lampshade on it: an FBI agent investigating a missing senator's wife tells a reporter that they don't want the same thing: while he wants the victim found safe and sound, she wants her missing for as long as possible to drum up her ratings.
On Cold Case, the squad reopens the cases of two teenagers (a white female and black male) who were murdered miles apart at the same time. The black teen's uncle asks if the coincidence is why they're giving his case so much attention; Detective Miller explains she had them reopen it because she was the one who found his nephew's body.
In AMC's The Killing, the police investigating the murder of a pretty young white girl follow a lead to a Seattle mosque. The imam hands them a MISSING flier and notes that the Seattle PD is putting a lot more effort into the Rosie Larsen case than it is for a missing Muslim girl.
Magazines
The "missing pretty girl syndrome" variation was brutally parodied in The Onion with the article "Ugly Girl Killed". A little girl is brutally murdered, but there's no outpouring of sympathy and horror simply because she was homely...a deliberate reference to the frenzy surrounding the then-recent killing of Jon-Benet Ramsey, who was a perfect little princess type.
Comedian Diane Morgan had something to say about this as well, asking why whenever a pretty girl gets killed, people say "look how pretty she was" as though it's somehow more of a loss, but whenever an ugly girl gets killed, no one says "fortunately she was an absolute moose!"
Stand-Up Comedy
Patrice O'Neal has a bit where he mentions that black people judge the beauty of a white woman by estimating how long her name would be in the media if she went missing. He mentions a serial killer of women, who was suspected of killing that white woman who went missing in Aruba, what was her name—
Audience Member: Natalee Holloway!
Yeah, and then there was that Peruvian girl just the other month, what was her name...?
Audience: *silence*
Later, he talks about the (black) NFL players lost at sea, who were declared dead much faster than the average lost white victims would be. He goes on to say that he won't go out to sea without "a white baby on a keychain".
Video Games
There is a Fantastic Racism version in Dragon Age 2 with a serial killer who targets elf girls. Law enforcement was not interested.
Webcomics
Spoofed in thisMuertitos comic — when the media finds out the lost girl isn't thin, blonde, and leggy (but is instead chubby, blue, and has no legs), they instantly lose interest.
Web Original
This article mercilessly satirizes this phenomenon.
Western Animation
Parodied in Family Guy, where a crowd of reporters swarm the site of a school bus crash that claimed the life of a young girl. They make zero effort to conceal their disappointment when it is announced that the victim's surname is Gutierrez.
Irritated Reporter: "That's not news!"
Parodied in the All Just a Dream simulation episode, when Stewie kills Cleveland and declares that he has to move quickly. "A missing black man? The media will be all over that."
Real Life — General
Unfortunate Implications: The media frenzy over killed, raped and kidnapped white women seems to imply that people just like hearing about it.
Worst News Judgement Ever: Critics of news media will point to "missing white woman syndrome" as a type of story that will disproportionate media coverage over serious crime and/or investigative, watchdog journalism. While these critics will agree that the safe discovery and return of any missing person – let alone the attractive woman fitting this trope – is important, the overblown coverage of those involving pretty women while neglecting other important stories is the point of contention. (To give an example, in the same community that a missing small-town high school homecoming queen is given extensive, lead story coverage, an ongoing debate over the questionable ethics of a charismatic government official well-liked by the media and the circle of well-known community officials gets buried/limited or no media coverage.) The other point of contention is that missing person stories involving other people – e.g., a middle-aged woman who is fat and ugly, even if she comes from a middle-class or affluent background – is ignored or given minimal coverage, while the pretty young woman gets banner headlines with numerous photos (e.g., the formal shot along with her in social settings), tearful pleas for her safe return, and so forth.
It doesn't just happen with respect to missing persons. If you interview a rape counselor, they will probably tell you that, although rape victims are less likely to be believed than any other victim group even with abundant objective medical evidence and witnesses, it sure helped if the victim was pretty, thin, heterosexual, female, and not aboriginal.
It should also be noted that the increase of missing white women in the news doesn't necessarily correspond to an increase in the number of people who have actually been kidnapped. When several of the aforementioned people were kidnapped, it was during years when kidnappings were actually behind the curve.
There is a similar phenomenon — whenever a teenage boy's death is reported, they show a picture of the boy...usually taken several years ago, showing a sweet twelve-year-old instead of a nasty fifteen-year-old.
The media is slowly turning away from missing pretty white women and girls and more towards missing pretty middle-class women and girls of any race, with such examples as Nancy Salas and Norma Lopez, both Hispanic and widely-covered at least in the LA area. Still a nasty and highly offensive trope.
One program on E! went into beautiful women who went missing. That's right, they specifically said they were talking about beautiful girls who went missing. Not just on E!, but on other shows talking about real-life crimes, if the victim is pretty they will explicitly state this, as if her attractiveness is relevant to the case or makes her a more important person. (Such as "This beautiful southern belle went missing one September evening". How do her looks matter?)
To E!'s credit, at least one-third of the cases featured involved minority women. At least there's an attempt to avert this Trope.
E! also did a similar list of Most Shocking Crimes (as well as other similar countdowns) and, IIRC, they overlooked really obvious shocking crimes like, say, well-known serial killers or terrorist activities in the US to focus almost exclusively on this Trope, mentioning Natalie Holloway and so on. If anything else made it on the list, it was a celebrity murder.
In Japan, white people are a minority (and a very small minority at that). The missing people cases that generate massive news coverage tend to be about children, preferably female, age 12 or younger.
As mentioned above in the header; There's a counter movement through social media that help spread the word about missing people of color through social networking sites like Facebook, tumblr etc.
Played straight in Ireland, whenever a woman kills a man. Two sisters murdered their mother's black husband, cutting his body into pieces (his head was never found), and there seems to be more focus on making fun of the so-called "Scissor sisters" than the man himself. The same has happened to several other high-profile murder cases, i.e. more emphasis on the woman who murdered or arranged the murder than the man she killed.
People from a poor, rural (and literally 99% white) area tend to see this as more "missing rich/city girl syndrome". Case in point — an attractive white 17-year-old girl in Maine mysteriously disappeared one night after being last seen at a gas station by herself. There was barely any coverage in the state itself, and there certainly wasn't a peep heard nationally. It seems to be more about social standing than race.
Race and gender are only two of the several social issues that go into perceived public concern for a missing child. As in most crimes there's a "could this happen to you / your child" factor that both the media and the public-at-large take into account. If a missing child comes from an middle or well-to-do area where few crimes happen, it's going to be treated as far more unusual (this is not to say "serious") then a missing child in a poverty-stricken, crime-infested, "don't snitch" neighborhood. The Trope would be more properly named "Missing, Non-Poor White Woman From Good Low-Crime Neighborhood Syndrome"...but that doesn't have the same ring to it, now does it?
Averted with the so-called "Atlanta Child Murders". Between 1979-81, 27 children fell victim to a serial killer. Despite the victims being poor, black, mostly male, and in some cases delinquents, the case received considerable national attention.
Also averted in the case of the "Clinton Avenue Five", five African-American teenage boys who disappeared from a playground in Newark in August 1978. Although poor and black, they were all "good kids", with the most trouble any of them had been in being a fist fight. The case was worked for 32 years before an arrest was finally made, but it was never ignored or dismissed by the media or the authorities.
This tends to be averted in local news in areas that are mostly minorities or have a large amount of minorities, mainly because there aren't a whole lot of white people anyway.
The most common target for serial killers are prostitutes; for exactly this reason. They're easily accessible, least likely to be missed, and a low priority for law enforcement and news reporting—-with gay male prostitutes getting the worst of it. And good luck finding a work that even acknowledges that straight male prostitutes exist.
Homosexual serial killer Herb Baumeister played on this fact — many of his victims were gay male prostitutes picked up from known cruising sites in Indianapolis. Not until a sixth or seventh man disappeared did law enforcement begin to suspect that the disappearances were connected and that the missing men were the victims of foul play.
Real Life — Specific
Unfortunately, Truth in Television — Even fourteen years after her death, you'd be hard-pressed to find an American who doesn't know who the wealthy, pretty white beauty queen Jon-Benet Ramsey was. However, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone outside the state (or indeed, anyone in the state who is not a daily local news viewer) who has heard of Aarone Thompson (a six-year-old black girl who disappeared in 2005), or Neveah Gallegos (a two-year-old Hispanic girl who was raped and murdered by her mother's boyfriend in 2007). Indeed, one suspects that the latter case received the small amount of coverage that it did only because it was tied into an investigation of several (very tragically literal) fatal mistakes made by the Denver Child Services department.
Two weeks after Jon-Benet's death, Toya Currie ("Girl X") was raped, poisoned and left for dead in a stairwell of the infamous Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago. The case was only covered in black-owned news media, and efforts to get white media to notice were only partially successful.
"No one is surprised when an underclass kid is raped or killed," says Patrick Murphy, the Cook County Public Guardian. "I think we expect these kids to get killed. It's not that people don't care. It's that they yawn. Whereas if it's a blond-haired, blue-eyed kid, they all go crazy. I've seen it a million times."
The Natalee Holloway case. Not only did the disappearance of a pretty, blonde, white American girl set off a massive media storm, it spawned two made-for-TV movies (Natalee Holloway and Justice for Natalee Holloway) and gave her (equally blonde and attractive) mother, Beth Holloway, a television series (Vanished). Natalee Holloway's page on The Other Wiki is even a Featured Article.
Several years later, Nancy Grace is still doing entire shows devoted to the Natalee Holloway case. If that case ever gets solved, there's a good chance that Nancy's show will end and/or her head will implode.
A Dutch crime reporter got an Emmy for his Holloway episode in which he managed to record a confession from the main suspect with a hidden camera. The suspect only confessed to unapropriate disposal of a body and the suspect later clarified that he only made up a story to impress the guy he was talking to. The episode was watched by 7 milion people in the Netherlands (population 16 milion). The highest rating in Dutch television history apart from sports events.
Also, there was a black girl about the same age as Natalee that went missing at the same time from the same place. I can't remember her name, and can't find her on Google. I remember her parents talking about it once to national media before giving up.
Unfortunately, Smart's case is to "blame" for the rise in prominence of this Trope. The case was so unbelievably sensational that anyone who covered it noticed a massive spike in ratings while covering it, thus leading networks to actively keep an eye out for missing white teenage girls, hoping to find another sensation to cash in on.
Not even the US Army is free of this Trope. Compare the treatment of captured white Pfc. Jessica Lynch with black Spc. Shoshana Johnson. Both were captured in the same ambush, but Lynch received national media attention, a made-for-TV movie, a larger disability payment, and was celebrated as a hero fighting to the last bullet. Even Lynch herself thinks she received too much exposure and accused the Army of fabricating her Hold the Line moment for good PR.
Johnson did receive recognition and accolades, but only after this discrepancy was brought up.
Jessica Lynch's real heroism was when she sat in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and, point by point, dissected the myths that had been created around her.
SPC Lori Piestewa (Hopi) was at the same attack that Lynch and Johnson were in. She was wounded and taken prisoner, but died from wounds sustained during the attack. She was the first Native American woman to die in combat while serving in the U.S. military, and received the Purple Heart. Ever heard of her? Probably only because you read or saw an interview where Lynch brought Piestewa up. She credited Piestewa with saving her life and has repeatedly named her as the "true hero" of that battle. Piestewa did get a mountain in Phoenix, Arizona named after her, though (formerly called Squaw Peak). And Lynch named her daughter in honor of her.
Also Truth In UK Television. Pretty much everybody in the United Kingdom knows about Madeline McCann, and her parents have received tons of money from all the donations they've received to help find their missing daughter (which was to charity, however).
Sometimes averted in the UK media if the missing woman was a white Eastern European, because of the popular prejudice against people from poorer Eastern European countries as scrounging immigrants who "steal" British jobs. If the woman had a "respectable" occupation that wasn't minimum-wage (businesswoman, student), she might be in with a chance of making the press; otherwise...otherwise it's likely the case will be swept under the carpet.
The problem of Missing White Woman Syndrome got some attention in Britain when two white teenagers, Amanda "Milly" Dowler and Danielle Jones, disappeared around the same time in 2001. Both made the national news and received a ton of press coverage. A body was found that was believed to be Jones, but was actually another missing white girl, Hannah Williams. Why had her case not been in the news? The police admitted that her being working class, from a single-parent family, and with a history of running away from home might have had something to do with it.
This trope was zig-zagged in the racially-motivated death of the black, British student Steven Lawrence, as it was heavily reported by the media. However, the police ignored both his case and his (also black) best friend's case; the killers were not found guilty until 2012, a full 20 years after it happened.
Something similar happened in the (prolonged) search for Milly Dowler- a body found in a likely location was reported at first as probably Milly's- then on closer inspection turned out to be that of a much older woman. Obviously there are good reasons why a missing mature woman doesn't create a national alert, but there was a palpable sense to the reporting of 'Thank goodness, it's just a grown woman that's been killed, not a pretty young girl...'
Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was able to remain undetected for a long period of time by preying exclusively on gay men from ethnic minorities. His ability to remain undetected for so long illustrates the fact that this focus on missing white women above missing persons from any other social or ethnic groups is not limited to media coverage but is sadly a factor in actual missing persons investigations as well—when the relatives of his victims called the police to report their loved ones missing, they were frequently dismissed with blase comments such as, "Well, he's a grown man, he can run off if he wants." Hell, the only reason he was even caught was because one of his intended targets escaped and immediately flagged down a police car.
Additionally, only a few weeks earlier, another victim (a young Asian boy) managed to escape from his apartment. When the cops arrived, they listened to the white Jeffrey Dahmer's story that the 14-year old boy was his 19-year old lover and had simply had too much to drink and completely ignored the two black women who had made the 911 call and were insisting that the boy had been trying to get away from Dahmer. Within minutes after the cops returned the boy to Dahmer's apartment and left, he became Dahmer's 14th victim. A few days later, one of the women read an article about the boy's disappearance and recognized him as the boy who had been seen with Dahmer. When she called the police, she was again ignored. It's doubtful that would have happened had she (or the boy, for that matter) been white.
Invoked by serial killer Ted Bundy, whose victims were the standard Missing White Woman — young, pretty college students, classic "good girls" whose families would notice them missing, who disappearances would(and did) get substantial attention from the media and the police. It's believed Bundy liked the ego boost and the attention he got from his crimes.
Bundy's first crimes got absolutely no national attention whatsoever, and that's because he targeted young women. At that point, young women were usually less likely, not more, to be featured as victims of crime, because everybody thought that any woman who disappeared was a stinking awful filthy disgusting whore who had run away to do stinking awful filthy disgusting whore things like take drugs and have wild anonymous sex. Seriously. One of Bundy's victims' families had to hound the police for two years to get their daughter's disappearance taken seriously — at one point, they were told right out that they were wasting police time bothering detectives about their whore of a daughter. In those words.
In one of the "Year in Review" recaps by Dave Barry, he had a running gag wherein various important news stories would hit the press, which prompted Greta Van Susteren to continue searching for Natalie Holloway.
Averted in the case of Annie Le, an Asian. She certainly got a lot of coverage, but only because she was hot. The media will usually make an exception to the skin tone if the girl looks cute enough.
Asians, particularly studious ones who go to the Ivy League or something similar, are honorary white people.
Not necessarily. We've all heard of Chandra Levy. But have you heard of Christine Mirzayan (Middle Eastern) or Joyce Chiang (Taiwanese)? Two years before Levy's disappearance, in separate instances, they disappeared and were later found murdered — circumstances virtually identical to the Levy case. They were young, pretty,well-educated "good girls", precisely the type of victim the media loves, yet neither case garnered anything beyond local attention despite the fact that one of the women (Chiang) was a federal employee. Not until the Levy case broke nearly two-and-a-half years later after Chiang's murder did anyone on a national level even know about either woman, and even then it was only because of the similarities in their cases (there was concern that a serial killer might be at work in the area). The Joyce Chiang case was finally solved 12 years later, but prosecutors have declined to press charges against her killers, as one is already in jail for another crime, while the other is in a non-extradition country (note the stark contrast between this and the arrest and prosecution of Chandra Levy's murderer). Meanwhile, the Mirzayan case remains unsolved.
Serial killer Robert Pickton was able to get away with killing prostitutes and drug users in Vancouver for years (convicted of six, charged with another 20) because of who his victims were. Further, unlike other notorious serial killers, Pickton didn't leave bodies for the authorities to find, thus allowing them to say they had no evidence of a serial killer.
One American station in Seattle ran a story about six of Pickton's victims. Two of the victims mentioned in the story were white, three were First Nations, and one was black. They only showed five of the victims' pictures, and guess whose photo they left out? In the same vein, at least one Canadian TV station did a similar thing with respect to the possible victim who was a transsexual.
Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, was on the other side of the border in Washington. Convicted of 48 killings, believed to have done more than twice that, and did it by getting poor runaways and prostitutes.
Considering the name of the trope, it should be noted that he also killed minorities as well as Caucasians.
Averted with the kidnapping of Cecilia Zhang in Canada, who got a lot of coverage...although she was pretty cute and Toronto has a pretty huge Chinese immigrant population, so she was certainly a big draw for ratings at the local level, at least.
Still, most likely an aversion. The news made headlines all the way down in California. Except again, see the business with Annie Le. Asians, particularly smart/promising ones, are honorary white people.
Played horrifically straight with the Jenifer Catcheway case and the other 154 native women who have gone missing in the past several years. In the case of Jennifer Catcheway, the mother had to struggle to even get the RCMP to investigate (they assumed she simply ran off, despite the mother's protests) and went on a massive campaign to finally get media attention to the problem.
Same happened with Robert Hansen from Alaska, who used to hunt kidnapped prostitutes. To this day, it's not even clear how many people he killed, though he's been convicted for 21 murders.
In 1998, a six-year-old boy from Hilo, Hawaii by the name of Peter Kema Jr. disappeared under highly-suspicious and mysterious circumstance. These circumstances were made all the more so by the fact that the family waited two months to report it to the authorities, and the story the father gave to them was a Blatant Lie. The family also had a record of abuse that stretched back several years and actually sparked statewide outrage when the full extent of Child and Family Services mismanagement was exposed. The story did not get much air time outside of Hawaii, and the fact that Kema was of mixed Native Hawaiian/Chinese/Filipino descent may have had something to do with it.
The infamous "Runaway Bride" — the woman claimed that she had been abducted when she failed to show up for her wedding. It turned out that she'd simply gotten cold feet and, rather than simply admit to the mistake, decided to allow the authorities to waste around $50,000 searching for her before making the call to let her family know that she was alive. She (thankfully) was made to pay back around $13,000 for the hoax, but earned far more than that by selling her story to a publisher. The lesson? Fake being kidnapped as a Missing White Woman, and you can make a lot of money!
In Living Color! did a skit on that exact thing about another woman (forgot who), including that it won't work if you're not white.
For that matter, Anders Behring Breivik (the Utoya shooter) could go here as well. The massacre didn't get very much play in the American news because he was a white (albeit European), educate, bourgeois male who was worried about the influence of foreign cultures in his country. Just like what happened with Stack, the story was quickly bumped out of the news by a celebrity death (Amy Winehouse this time.)
This could have been a negative example as well, partly in due to his skin condition; as far as anyone not familiar with him past the molestation charges would have known, he was white.
The coverage of Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt was an example of this. She hid in a crawlspace under the breezeway between her family's house and garage, where she took a bottle of sleeping pills and lay there for two days. Headlines from LA to Daytona covered the massive search for the "pretty Smith girl" and her subsequent discovery.
Suicide due to school bullying is sadly nothing new. However, the suicide of Massachusetts high school student Phoebe Prince set off a nationwide outcry against bullying and prompted dozens of threatening letters to be sent to the six students accused of causing her suicide. The case of another boy in the same area who committed suicide due to bullying, Carl Walker Hoover, received much less coverage. Not only was Hoover black, but he had been heavily bullied by classmates who were, for whatever reason, convinced that he was gay. This has not gone unnoticed.
In the midst of the riots going on in Egypt, with civilians all over the nation in danger of looters and soldiers, what was NBC talking about during all this? How one Caucasian American old woman was in Egypt right now and needed to be brought home as soon as possible. Similarly, an attractive blonde news reporter, Lara Logan, made news when she was sexually assaulted.
Washington Post reporter Alexandra Petri pointed out that we never would have heard about what Egyptian women and foreign women visitors to Egypt live with every day if the Lara Logan thing had not happened; Logan was "not a faceless statistic, but a known, blonde, white woman."
The Grim Sleeper murders are looking more and more like an example of this trope. To elaborate, the Grim Sleeper was a (recently arrested) serial murder who raped and murdered at least 7 black women during the 1980's, took a 14 year "break" (although now it looks like he was still killing), then started killing again in the early 2000's. The police force, despite knowing that all the murders were connected, never informed the public . In fact, they didn't even admit to the presence of a serial killer until an "alternative newspaper" broke the story. That's right. There had been an active serial killer in LA for over 20 years and no one knew. Quite a few bloggers are asking if the response would have been the same if the victims were all white women.
There's a similar situation in Cleveland, in which a serial killer Anthony Sewell was found to have entombed his ten victims in and around his house. Despite the man's previous convictions for rape, he was never flagged as a suspect in the disappearance of these women, who had varying backgrounds (mostly checkered), but were all African-American.
The Caylee Anthony trial exploited this from both angles. The missing girl, of course, drew a lot of attention but the fact that her mother (and prime suspect) Casey was also a young and pretty white woman certainly doubled it.
This trope also showed itself to be in full swing in Québec, Canada, when Cédrika Provencher, a young white girl, went missing in 2007. Provincial news was rife with news of her kidnapping for years, an official song was composed to find her, and the search for her is still officially ongoing as of 2011. There have been several other missing persons since, but nobody seems to care since they're not woobie white girls.
Averted in the Ipswich Serial Murders that occurred in the winter of 2006 - all five of the victims were prostitutes, and all of them had become prostitutes to fund a drug habit. Despite this, all of the murders were given a high profile, and people in the area were told by the police to be extra cautious. This is probably due to where the murders took place - Suffolk is usually seen as a more quiet part of England, and the idea that a serial murder could happen in such a peaceful place shocked people. The strange part of the case is that, because they were all fairly local to the area, the media coverage and the public's reactions were very sympathetic, and campaigners have used the murders to try and change the law to make things safer for prostitutes.
Inverted in the disappearance of Lucie Blackman,a Caucasian women murdered in Japan. Her family received little help from the police "because Lucie was working illegally in a job from which women often flee without notice".
In San Diego, at virtually the same time that seven-year-old Danielle Van Dam disappeared (and was later found murdered) in 2002, an African-American boy of about the same age disappeared while in the company of his mother's boyfriend. The boyfriend said that he left the boy outside a convenience store while he went inside to shop. When he came out, the boy was gone. The mother expressed her anger several times to the media when they covered the disappearance of the white, blond Danielle while her son's disappearance was virtually ignored.
The trope also applies to how the media handles disappeared people when they resurface. Near the end of 2011, two college girls when missing in the United States. One was white and the other was middle-eastern and Muslim. Thankfully both were found okay. ABC news received backlash when one of it's web journalists wrote an article about the two cases, needlessly comparing the two. The article treated the white girl's case, where she became snowbound in her car after making some questionable navigational choices in a car ill-prepared for snow travel, as something that could happen to anyone. The author then scolded the middle-eastern girl for being recklessly inconsiderate by losing her cellphone on a class trip and even entertained notions she had run off on a romantic fling (she was engaged at the time).
ABC News has since redacted the story and has stated it will no longer accredit stories by the author.
An American woman with an undefined "life-threatening condition" being held hostage by Somalian pirates for three months was rescued by US Navy SEALs. The fact that the SEALs were from the same SEAL Team 6 that killed bin Laden got more coverage than the second hostage (a 60-year-old man from Denmark named Poul Hagen Thisted, if you're curious).
