History Main / MissingWhiteWomanSyndrome

* As detailed in [[http://books.google.com/books/about/No_One_Can_Hurt_Him_Anymore.html?id=Z-cmAiMZd7AC No One Can Hurt Him Anymore]], the murder of 10 year old AJ Schwarz may relied on this. AJ and his half-sister, Patsy, where sent to live with his father and stepmother after their mother were found unfit. While both were physically abused by said stepmother to an extent, AJ was treated like a slave, often locked in a cellar room, often denied food (and at one point, forced to eat a cockroach), and not allowed to have friends. Even though Patsy was treated much better in comparison, the physical abuse was enough to convince police to send Patsy back to her mother after two years, while AJ was still forced to live with them. Over a year later, the stepmother ended up beating AJ to death.

* 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!"

** In one of the "Year in Review" recaps by DaveBarry, 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.

* The reason why serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer remained undetected for a long time was because he preyed exclusively on gay men from ethnic minorities. His ability to escape notice illustrates 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." The only reason he was even ''caught'' was because one of his intended targets escaped and immediately flagged down a police car--several weeks after ''another'' victim, a young Asian boy, nearly escaped, but was returned to Dahmer's apartment after he smooth-talked the cops--who completely ignored the African-American women who were insisting that the boy had been trying to get away from Dahmer. An article written several weeks after Dahmer's crimes--and this horrific error--were discovered stated that this would never have happened had the races been reversed.

* 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 its 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 retracted the story and has stated it will no longer accredit stories by the author.

* In fiction, writers tend to be more savvy and aware of the use of this trope...

** An interesting bit of trivia about the media's obsession with Chandra Levy -- Levy's mother, Susan, had the media camped out in her yard for ''months'' in 2001 because the case got so much attention. She had ''stopped watching television'' because she was tired of seeing herself and her daughter on TV. One day Susan noticed something strange - the news trucks were all inexplicably packing up and leaving. That was how she learned about the September 11 attacks.

** ''InLivingColor'' did a skit on that exact thing about another woman (forgot who), including that it won't work if you're not white.

* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_Sleeper Grim Sleeper]] murders are looking more and more like an example of this trope. To elaborate, the Grim Sleeper was a serial killer who raped and murdered at least 7 black women during the 1980', took a 14-year "break" (although now it looks like he was still killing), then started up again in the early 2000s. The police, 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. 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.

* A variation on and partial inversion of this trope can be seen in media coverage of LGBT victims of suicide and hate crimes. Overall, victims who are male, [[{{Transgender}} cisgender]], and, especially, white tend to get the most coverage--compare how the deaths of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Tyler_Clementi Tyler Clementi]] and [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard Matthew Shepard]] were covered with those of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakia_Gunn Sakia Gunn]] and [[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/04/coko-williams_n_1403803.html Coko Williams]]. This has the unfortunate effect of making LGBT rights seem like a "white" issue and leaving out the struggles of lesbians and, to a much greater extent, [[{{Transgender}} trans people]].
** Averted case: Coko Williams, the lack of coverage may be because she was murdered in Detroit. Due to the high crime rate, seeing murders daily on the Detroit news has become almost routine, so specific cases are rarely given more attention than any others.

** An interesting bit of trivia about the media's obsession with Chandra Levy -- Levy's mother, Susan, had the media camped out in her yard for ''months'' in 2001 because the case got so much attention. She had ''stopped watching television'' because she was tired of seeing herself and her daughter on TV. One day Susan noticed something strange - the news trucks were all inexplicably packing up and leaving ...it was September 11, 2001.

* This Trope may have its roots in the 17th Century captivity narratives written by Mary Rowlandson, making this one OlderThanRadio.

* In ''Pop Goes the Weasel'', one of the AlexCross series of detective novels, a DangerouslyGenreSavvy SerialKiller 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.

** It's alive and well there, too... when model quality [[http://gawker.com/5947869/teenage-girl-tweets-there-is-someone-in-my-house-and-disappears-social-media-shitstorm-ensues Kara Alongi]] tweeted "There is someone in my hou[se], call 911" the internet exploded with hash tags and Facebook "likes". (A few asked why she didn't just dial 911 herself.) Police resources were tied up looking for her for several days. Found traveling on her own, Kara had [[http://news.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474981680153 faked her own kidnapping]] to cover up that she had run away from home after a quarrel with friends over an underage drinking party. Well, "Like its boring old relative, cable news, there is nothing that gets social media more excited than an imperiled white teenage girl...."

[[folder:News Coverage]]

[[folder: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".
* UK comedian Diane Morgan 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!"
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Video Games]]
* There is a FantasticRacism version in VideoGame/DragonAgeII with a serial killer who targets elf girls. Law enforcement is not interested - even LawfulGood city-guard Aveline is prepared to look the other way if you just kill him. Another factor in this case is that [[spoiler:the quest-giver, a city magistrate, is the killer's father. Even the killer tells you his father is just going to help cover up his crimes.]]
** Averted in the case of the game's prominent serial killer Quentin. Even though he's exclusively targeting human women [[spoiler: to use their body parts to re-build a simulacrum of his dead wife]], no one save one [[CowboyCop old templar]] believes that he exists and that these women are simply running off.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Webcomics]]
* Spoofed in [[http://muertitos.comicgenesis.com/d/20070320.html this]] ''{{Muertitos}}'' 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'''.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Original]]
* [[http://www.asgoodasnews.com/volume_2/issue_1/fox_announces_the.html This article]] mercilessly satirizes this phenomenon.
* The [[http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2005/06/24/lb-finishing-chapter-6/ Slacktivist blog]]'s {{Spork}}ing of ''Literature/LeftBehind'' mentions this while making a wisecrack about how blasé the characters are to [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt every single child and almost every single Christian on the planet all simultaneously vanishing without a trace]].
-->Whatever the precise figure of the disappeared, however, we can safely assume that it included hundred of thousands, if not millions of young, attractive white women. [[AuthorAvatar Buck]] is watching {{CNN}}. Think of it: Millions of missing white women, all at the same time. What would CNN do? Would they cover them all? Or maybe just the blonde ones?
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Western Animation]]
* Parodied in ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'', 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 simulation episode, when Stewie kills Cleveland and declares that he has to move quickly. "Black man gone missing? My god, the media will be all over that."
** And again in "And I'm Joyce Kinney", where one news segment ends with Tom remembering "Oh also, that little girl's still missing" almost as an afterthought; naturally, he mentions that said little girl is Puerto Rican.
** And in "Bigfat", Peter has gone missing in Canada for two months, one of the rangers asks Lois if he's black. When she says no, they reveal they haven't been searching at all.
[[/folder]]

** And in "Bigfat", Peter has gone missing in Canada for two months, one of the rangers asks Lois is he's black. When she says no, they reveal they haven't been searching at all.

* 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".

** To be fair, no fowl play was involved of that of the old woman and her death was always suspected to be a case of just dying in an odd place.

* In the novel ''Reliquary'', the string of kidnappings in New York garners media attention only after a pretty young blonde woman vanishes.

* Briefly referenced in the Confessor arc of Creator/KurtBusiek's ''AstroCity'', 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.

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 "[[DistressedDamsel 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 [[SerialKiller Robert Pickton]] was able to get away with killing over fifty Vancouver prostitutes.

A term for when media coverage ratchets up to follow the murder, kidnapping, or disappearance of white females, often pretty and young, and often to the exclusion of minority, male, and older missing persons.

** And while we're on the subject of Colorado, the [[http://www.9news.com/news/article/293754/188/Missing-girls-elementary-school-on-lockout disappearance of Jessice Ridgeway]].

** Several years later, Nancy Grace is still doing entire shows devoted to the Natalee Holloway case. If that case ever gets solved (which it probably won't as they NeverFoundTheBody), there's a good chance that Nancy's show will end or her head will implode, whichever comes first.

* Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer remained undetected for a long time by preying exclusively on gay men from ethnic minorities. His ability to escape notice illustrates 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." The only reason he was even ''caught'' was because one of his intended targets escaped and immediately flagged down a police car--several weeks after ''another'' victim, a young Asian boy, nearly escaped, but was returned to Dahmer's apartment after he smooth-talked the cops--who completely ignored the African-American women who were insisting that the boy had been trying to get away from Dahmer. An article written several weeks after Dahmer's crimes--and this horrific error--were discovered stated that this would never have happened had the races been reversed.

* 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 one woman (Chiang) being 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.
** Chandra Levy's case getting so much attention to the point it turned into a missing white woman syndrome case had less to do with her being a 'pretty white woman' (according to some less-pleasant groups, she didn't qualify as white for starters) than with the initial suspect being a member of Congress with whom she was allegedly having an affair.

* 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".

* 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 retracted the story and has stated it will no longer accredit stories by the author.

** For Coko Williams, the lack of coverage may be because she was murdered in Detroit. Due to the high crime rate, seeing murders daily on the Detroit news has become almost routine, so specific cases are rarely given more attention than any others.
* Britanee Drexel was a 17-year-old from the Rochester, New York area that went missing in 2009, when she went to Myrtle Beach, SC after being told she couldn't by her parents. Coverage of her case tended to leave out the 2nd half of it, instead focusing on "She went missing on Spring Break!"

* On a similar note, [[http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/011/343bhxcl.asp as noted in the Weekly Standard]], the Columbine massacre has left its mark on our nation for decades. Yet you've probably never heard of the black teenager (name not given, by the way) who gunned down two of his classmates at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn back in 1992. In addition to his skin color, the relative obscurity of this incident may have something to do with the fact that the shooting was in a well-known high-crime inner-city neighborhood. In other words, even if any his victims had been white, it probably wouldn't have gotten much more than a day's mention in the local news. When two white kids go berserk and shoot up a high school in a wealthy and predominantly white suburban neighborhood, however, everybody and his pet cause has to be there to exploit it--because, you see, [[UnfortunateImplications school shootings happen all the time in poverty-stricken minority neighborhoods; but surely not in wealthy, predominantly white neighborhoods]].

* On May 6, 2013, three women who had been kidnapped as teens and kept in an ordinary home in a Cleveland neighborhood for over ten years were found after one managed to [[http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57583166/frantic-911-call-ends-ordeal-for-3-long-missing-women/ get out of the house and call police]]. Amanda Berry, Gina deJesus and Michelle Knight are alive and safe, along with Berry's six-year-old daughter. [=DeJesus=] is Hispanic and [[http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/05/michelle_knight_missing_for_de.html Knight was a single teen mother]] at the time of her kidnapping. Guess which one's case has received the most attention over the years.

* On May 6, 2013, three women who had been kidnapped as teens and kept in an ordinary home in a Cleveland neighborhood for over ten years were found after one managed to [[http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57583166/frantic-911-call-ends-ordeal-for-3-long-missing-women/ get out of the house and call police]]. Amanda Berry, Gina deJesus and Michelle Knight are alive and safe, along with Berry's six-year-old daughter. De_Jesus is Hispanic and [[http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/05/michelle_knight_missing_for_de.html Knight was a single teen mother]] at the time of her kidnapping. Guess which one's case has received the most attention over the years.

* The [[http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2005/06/24/lb-finishing-chapter-6/ Slacktivist blog]]'s {{Sporking}} of ''Literature/LeftBehind'' mentions this while making a wisecrack about how blasé the characters are to [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt every single child and almost every single Christian on the planet all simultaneously vanishing without a trace]].

* On May 6, 2013, three women who had been kidnapped as teens and kept in an ordinary home in a Cleveland neighborhood for over ten years were found after one managed to [[http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57583166/frantic-911-call-ends-ordeal-for-3-long-missing-women/ get out of the house and call police]]. Amanda Berry, Gina deJesus and Michelle Knight are alive and safe, along with Berry's six-year-old daughter. DeJesus is Hispanic and [[http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/05/michelle_knight_missing_for_de.html Knight was a single teen mother]] at the time of her kidnapping. Guess which one's case has received the most attention over the years.