I don’t want anyone’s’ daughter, fiancee or friend, whatever to go missing. She doesn’t seem to be a celebrity. Surely there must be other missing people who are not getting hourly updates in the news.
Missing Cute Blonde White Woman Syndrome with a side of “self-proclaimed ‘influencers’ are mega-celebrity centers of the universe” would be my very cynical guess.
Indeed there are.
In 2019, the Montgomery Advisor published a story about missing person cases involving Black women and girls in Alabama that went unsolved and underreported.
Kimberly Arrington was reportedly abducted when she was 16 and was last seen on Oct. 30, 1998. LaQuanta Riley went missing when she was 19 and was last seen on December 7, 2003. Aubrina Mack left her home on August 15, 2006, at the age of 21 and hasn’t been seen since. Nanette Thomas hasn’t been seen since she was reportedly abducted at the age of 51 on April 9, 2016. Lakira Goldsmith has been missing since Nov. 27, 2018, when she was 20. Keyquanna Burton disappeared on March 6, at the age of 44. Donna Michelle Calloway was last seen on August 28, 2019, when she was 39.
The Advisor included photos and descriptions of all of these women along with numbers to call if anyone has any information on them. But since none of them got anywhere near the same coverage Petito has gotten—with most of them not making it past minimal local coverage—chances of them ever being found are as limited as the reporting on their stories have been.
A culmination of an 18-month effort led by the state’s Division of Victim Services, the study found that only 18 percent of Indigenous women who were reported missing received newspaper media coverage.
Researchers also found that media coverage of missing Indigenous persons was more likely to have negative character framing and less likely to exist when they were still missing. Many times, articles were only published after an individual was found dead.
I think there’s a vicious/virtuous cycle with media coverage and law enforcement. When LE devotes significant resources to a case, even if they’re unsuccessful, it gives the press something to cover. They’re talking to this person who saw her yesterday; they’re pulling her cell phone records, they’re serving a warrant, they’ve got dogs out sniffing. Media coverage helps law enforcement by alerting the public, some of whom may have pertinent info or can at least keep an eye out, and it also puts pressure on LE to keep searching. But racial bias can lead those in charge of police investigations to see mysterious disappearances differently depending on the missing person-- white girl = victim, while nonwhite girl = runaway, accomplice, made her own bed. And the media tend to deem missing white girls more newsworthy.
I’m glad to see this topic no longer cluttering up the other thread. I’m going to leave out the racial topic, as that has already been discussed in other posts.
The case was interesting because this wasn’t ordinary. Domestic abuse and murder is, unfortunately, common. My mother was a victim of it, and so is my sister. Fortunately, they are both alive (and my mother’s abuser has been dead for decades).
Ray Rice beat his fiancee Janay Palmer, and that was caught in elevator footage. The case caught further attention when Palmer married him anyway. People were stunned in disbelief, myself included.
This was another unusual case. Domestic abusers don’t normally take people on cross-country trips and then abandon them or worse (at least I hope not!). They were already social media influencers, although very small time, so we had lots of video; while I didn’t watch the Van Life stuff, some people following the cases did and felt like they got to “know” the victim. The alleged perpetrator came home in her van, callously not informing Petito’s family that she had gone missing. Given the distances traveled, there was a real fear that we might never know what happened to Petito, there was a small chance (now gone) that she was still alive and stranded somewhere, and now the alleged perpetrator is probably hiding somewhere. The wide area search required a lot of police resources, which of course drew media attention.
This article seems right on the mark:
Mostly because she was an attractive blonde white female. But partly because of the likelihood that she was killed by her fiance while on a trip with him. If she was ugly or a minority or a male, it wouldn’t make the front page of any paper.
The coverage may have started because of MWWS, but she’s been found and we’re on to something else: White Male Villain Bashing. No, I’m not defending Laundrie, but that’s kind of my point. No one is defending him. If he’s found alive, he’s gonna get jeered worse than Tim McVeigh. He’s getting jeered now, for seemingly making things worse for himself at every turn, and for his apparent white male privilege entitlement. It’s a carryover from #metoo and BLM: finally, a dilemma that a straight white male can’t get himself out of simply by virtue of being straight, white and male.
And another factor is that the stories we hear about usually have some kind of hook. One partner was cheating (maybe cheating on their SO with the victim), or, as in this case, both parties were engaging in some unusual activity. And in this case, not just unusual, but somewhat pretentious and privileged. And I think if this was slightly less sinister, if Gabby had gotten lost after an argument with Brian, if he’d reported her missing right away, and she turned up three days later, injured and mortified but alive, there would be people saying “That’s what she gets.”
And before Gabby’s body was found, I remember speculation, here and elsewhere, that she might be a willing participant in a hoax. She didn’t have full credibility until she was pronounced dead. While she was presumed alive, there was a certain undercurrent of snark in comments about her, and, even then, grumbling about MWWS. So maybe this is what it takes to get the media off the dime and start reporting on non-white women in jeopardy?
I think people who ascribe to the “missing white woman syndrome” theory are falling victim to selection bias probably because it makes sense with their larger view of the world–that the world generally values attractive white women more than people of color. I actually agree that in so much as our culture operates with systemic racism in it, that latter claim is true, but I don’t think it nearly explains why some cases like this get national attention and why some do not.
For example, the FBI’s UCR documents about 1900 reported cases of domestic human trafficking per year–these are women who are forced into prostitution, and who are often runaways or missing persons to their families. A good chunk of them are white women, and some of those are probably attractive. The vast majority never get the Gabby Petito treatment. Also, that 1900 reported cases is widely believed by basically every expert in the field to be an undercount by roughly a factor of 25 (meaning it’s believed upwards of 50,000 women and girls are trafficked annually in the United States.)
In addition to trafficking, there are missing persons. Around 600,000 missing person files are opened every year. The vast, vast majority are never really in danger, many of the files are quickly closed. But there are still tens of thousands that represent serious events–runaways, non-custodial parental kidnappings, involuntary kidnappings of adults, murdered persons whose bodies have not been discovered etc. In a typical year around 500 unidentified bodies are added to the missing persons file (they add discovered, unidentified bodies to the file in hopes of identifying them.)
The reality is there are almost certainly thousands upon thousands of white women who disappear every year, sometimes under nefarious circumstances.
Anecdotally, as a “true crime” nerd I can tell you of a number of cases I’m familiar with that never got significant attention compared to more “famous” cases.
One prominent example I’m familiar with is the disparate treatment of Morgan Harrington vs Hannah Graham, during their disappearances and subsequently discovered murders. This was a somewhat local case here in Virginia. A 20 year old white girl, Virginia Tech student, travels to Charlottesville, VA (where the University of Virginia is located) to attend a Metallica concert. She leaves the concert and is later seen hitch hiking on a bridge. She then becomes missing. It made a bit of local news, but not much. It made a bit more news about three months later when her body was found in a shallow grave–brutally beaten to death and raped.
The interesting thing about the low level of attention her case got, is almost 5 years later another young college student disappeared in Charlottesville–Hannah Graham. Hannah was a student at UVA who got into the wrong car after a night partying downtown. Her disappearance immediately became national news, her body was found five weeks later, and Jesse Matthew was quickly arrested for her murder. Discovered after the arrest was physical evidence linking Matthew to Morgan’s murder 5 years earlier. For many people the first time the Morgan Harrington case made the news was when it was linked to the much more prominent Hannah Graham case. Why such disparate treatment between two similar aged young white women?
My honest best guess? Morgan Harrington was perceived as being less interesting. She was at a rock concert and hitch hiking; things good girls don’t do. She was a student at Virginia Tech, a less prestigious school than the patrician University of Virginia. Morgan grew up in Roanoke in SW Virginia, not a tony or important place. Hannah came from a wealthier family, was born in the United Kingdom and grew up in Fairfax County–depending on which year, Fairfax County has regularly been on top of the “richest county in America” list. Hannah’s father was a long-time employee of the World Bank, which frankly probably helped him get more attention for her story while she was missing.
Hannah had a narrative journalists were interested in at a national level, Morgan didn’t.
Yeah, the reason seems glaringly obvious to me.
You always need a hook–and being an attractive white woman is never enough, it can help build the conditions for it, though. This case became big news because her parents fought like hell to get the fact that her boyfriend had driven cross country in their shared van without her, and had been refusing to answer any questions about where she was. That, and the fact she was doing a van vlog or whatever, generated enough interest.
I think a lot of you are unfamiliar with how often attractive white women are killed by domestic partners if you really think that’s all that goes into it.
Seems you’ve gotten the wrong end of the Bayesian analysis. Nobody in this thread has claimed it’s enough to simply be an attractive white woman to garner national attention.
But given a missing person’s case has somehow gotten nationwide interest and attention, you can with high probability guess an attractive young white woman is involved. And likely one from a middle or upper class background.
Put in more mathematical terms:
P(Attractive White Woman | National Attention) >>>>> P(Literally Anybody Else| National Attention)
It’s may not be enough on its own to get national attention but it’s almost an iron-clad prerequisite (extraordinary fame or wealth can sometimes substitute).
I live in FL and it doesn’t appear to dominate the news here. The only social media I participate in is this place (in fact, this is where I first heard about it) so I’m wondering if that makes a difference?
It seems to have exploded just in the last 48 hours or so. It’s front page news on the CNN, MSNBC, and BBC homepages. It’s THE topic of conversation du jour among my high school-aged students. I assume it’s being covered on local TV news as well but haven’t checked.
The “less dead” is a tragically real syndrome and doesn’t need counter examples to validate it. This case has blown up because the Internet loves a good mystery - one that comes with social media posts, timelines, even video footage - which until the police spill makes every armchair detective feel like their pet theory is as valid as any other.
When I wrote the OP there were three articles on CNN, each covering a different angle. One of them was about all the people gathering at the home of the boyfriend’s parents demanding “answers”. One lady said the case “Called out to her” and she drove two hours and wasn’t leaving until she had answers. What do they expect the parents to do - walk out the door and reveal the entire plot?
** I’m not suggesting there is a plot, just wondering what the picketers expect.
I just thought of something. It might be a factor in why crimes against women of color are underreported. Or I might be sampling the brown acid, but here goes.
Take Laci Peterson. All through the search and after her body was found, sentiment was about 50/50 between “Poor Laci and her unborn child” and “Scott Peterson is a cheating, murdering SOB.” Now, I hope I’m not jumping to conclusions in thinking that in the cases of missing black women, the prime suspects are black men. But if that’s so, maybe TPTB think it’s unwise to risk presenting a black man as a cheating, murdering SOB. I mean, it’s not just giving an adequate amount of coverage to non-whites. It’s also making sure the coverage does not “other” them, present them as “those people”. Again, if that’s wrong, apologies in advance.
I agree that the article is on the mark, but they completely missed the lesson of the domestic violence angle. That group pushed for these mandatory arrest laws. The witness, Petito, and Laundrie all stated that she hit him. The laws that these groups passed mandated her arrest, yet the officers got creative to keep from arresting her–far from being “good ole boys” as accused, they found a way around the laws that the group created and demands be enforced.
The accusation was unfair anyways. Many times cops play the nice guy to get a person to admit something:
Cop: “Sure, you had to pop her a few times, right? Us guys know how it is…you didn’t break her jaw, did you?”
Suspect: “No, I just hit her, ha ha!”
Cop: “Put your hands behind your back.”
I’m not trying to hijack the thread, but this came up in defense attorney circles today. Girl is victim of abuse and is murdered by her abusive boyfriend, but DV laws should have sent her to jail. No wonder abuse isn’t reported. The abused may go to jail because of that single moment of frustration when she lashes out. That is a unique thing that is causing this case to get coverage.
For me, it was the photos on social media. They depicted a story of a couple deeply in love and just starting out on their lives. Gabby was hugging Brian in many of the pictures. It reminds me of my life after college. The optimism and confidence that I’d start a family, buy a house, and build a successful career. Everything seems possible when your 22.
That happiness bubble was burst when I saw the truth in the police video. There was some disturbing and dark stuff in that relationship. They weren’t arguing over who washes dishes. By then I was already hooked and following the case.
There’s also the natural curiosity about what happened and how things went so badly wrong between these two people. They were together for over 2 years.
The corollary was “Minority gets something racist/bigoted written on their receipt” which would literally make CNN’s top news story whenever it happened.