Missing White Women Syndrome, and why it never goes away

Jordan You may have first encountered it as a teenager when you were introduced to cable news. You may have seen it any number of times since then. Most recently, you remember it from late this summer when once again media from America to Canada to most of the English speaking world was focused on the plight of a single person. A normal, young, pretty, white woman, who was missing.

News Clips …the investigation into the Gabby Petito case, taking another dramatic turn…

…one of the last time that the couple had some sort of encounter with law enforcement was in Moab when somebody reported that they had seen some sort of altercation…

…this is the memorial site where people are paying with their respects for the time being…

…a legion of citizen sleuths have been taking the TikTok with their theories and observations. The hashtag Gabby Petito has nearly 800 million views…

Jordan If you paid even a little bit of attention to the discussion of coverage of the Gabby Petito story, you likely saw or heard people pushing back against the wall to wall coverage of this one woman’s disappearance. You probably heard and saw them sharing pictures and stories of other women who had gone missing even more recently than Gabby. Black women, Indigenous women, also lost without a trace, but without an entire continent looking for them. This is what’s called Missing White Women Syndrome, in action. But it’s nothing new. A decade ago, a Canadian researcher decided to try to quantify this phenomenon by looking at coverage of missing people from local areas across the spectrum. By now in this intro, you can guess what she found back then, but that was a decade ago, and we have spent much of the past ten years learning how to do better. We have had an entire national inquiry into the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. We have learned by now how to counter our own biases, haven’t we?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Kristen Gilchrist-Salles is a researcher who has explored differences in local Canadian press coverage of missing Indigenous and white women. Hi, Kristen.

Kristen Hi.

Jordan I’m going to start with this because it’s been sadly in the news recently, as it often is. When you see discussions around something called missing White Women syndrome, what are we talking about there in your mind?

Kristen Yeah. So when I hear that, what I’m thinking is the Media’s tendency to focus on violence that happens specifically to white girls like white women. I think the media has an obsession with this concept of innocence, and blonde, white, middle class women fit really well into that sort of existing mold. And so what ends up happening is that those cases end up taking on a life of their own, the community’s able to rally and mobilize. Folks get a really good idea of who the person was. You get to know details about their life, their values, their family.

But that doesn’t happen for everyone, right? If the person isn’t white, blonde, middle class, especially if they’re racialized or they’re very poor, they’re involved in street life. The tendency is to sort of either ignore them or to demonize them. That’s something I’ve been seeing fairly consistently, like across media for a number of years.

Jordan I know that there’s probably a one word answer for this next question I’m about to ask, but why do we tend to cover missing blonde white women as innocent? And we don’t tend to apply the innocent label to missing Black girls or missing Indigenous girls?

Kristen I mean, I think that speaks to the systemic racism in society in general. And I think that’s fairly embedded in media as well, like media makers tend to be white, especially owners of media. I feel like those stories, they’re easier to tell to a white audience. There’s usually this idea of that could be my daughter or she’s everyone’s daughter. And I think that really does just speak to racism and exclusion and the construction of a particular kind of whiteness as the ideal. And then folks who don’t fit in that are marginalized.

And that doesn’t mean that every single white woman who goes missing is going to be given that sort of extra attention because we see women in the sex trade or poor women or women who use drugs who are white, they tend to sort of just be ignored as well and demonized. So I think it’s probably a pretty particular image of the white girl that we see in our head, like I’m seeing it in my head now. The blonde, the beautiful, the thin, the white, the middle class, the educated.

Jordan I think a lot of the time when we hear discussion about this syndrome around a particular case and we’ll get to the high profile case in a little bit, it seems like an anecdotal thing. But this is where I ask you, is it just an anecdotal thing, or can we document how this works?

Kristen I think it’s possible to document. And I’ve done so in the past. About ten years ago, probably more than ten years now, I did a master’s degree that explored media representations of missing Indigenous women and compared them with missing and murdered white women. I’ve done some follow ups a few times since then in different capacities, but it really does continue. I haven’t seen much of a shift.

Jordan Well, let’s start ten years ago or more then, tell me about your original research project and what you did.

Kristen Sure. So it was for a master’s degree that I was completing in criminology at the University of Ottawa. And basically, I wanted to have some of that tangible evidence, because folks had been saying, Indigenous community members had been saying for years and years that the media was not covering their loved ones disappearances and deaths. And then when they were, the coverage was super problematic. And I was just hearing that really all over. And I thought, okay, well, this is something I might be able to test. And so that became the project.

And that is exactly what the findings were, right. That Indigenous women are sort of relegated to back pages, like they don’t get their full face shown. There’s not heaps of details. It’s just really cursory, like, very surface level coverage. And what I found when I was researching the cases of the white women, it was easy to connect with them, like to feel, because we had so much information, because there was so much investment, it was very easy to grieve for them. It was very easy to mobilize for change or for action in those particular cases.

But when the focus isn’t there or when it’s sort of, like, relegated to the back page or just is not the main story, then the wider community doesn’t, I don’t think, get the chance. It doesn’t have the capacity to grieve and mourn that person.

Jordan When you actually looked into this, what was your process? And how did you count the kinds of coverage that these missing women received?

Kristen Yeah. So there’s a few different ways that I did that, I would look at things like word lengths, the actual language used in the articles, the number of them that were seen, sort of how they were clustered over a consecutive number of days, just things like that where I would take a look at different pieces of the puzzle. And then I was able to also go back and look at where they were, this was newspapers at the time, to look at on microfiche, like how each story was presented on the page.

And I think that was really impactful as well, because that, for me, is like where you can see there would be like photos from childhood of a missing and murdered white girl. There would be a police tip line, just like a plethora of information about the case. And then when you looked at what was being said in the stories, there was just really big disparities. Like I said, sometimes they still use mugshots for racialized, poor women who disappear or have been murdered, or they use teeny little passport sized photos if they use one at all. I found the media, they’ll use, like, nicknames and just sweet endearing descriptions of, like, the sort of typical missing white woman.

Jordan I can already hear it. And we’re talking about the stuff that makes you relate to them, right? Like they mentioned that she was taking swimming lessons and wanted to be a lifeguard. And she walked home with her best friend from childhood every day after school. And then on the flip side of that coin, the phrase ‘known to police’ comes to mind.

Kristen Yeah. Or ‘high risk lifestyle’. Or even in the absence of that, there would be nothing printed. I feel like if they couldn’t focus on a negative, they would just not focus on the case. So there would just be, like, Aboriginal or Indigenous mom went missing, and then it would be like a 200 word article. And then that would be it. And that was fairly typical.

Jordan And this was all in 2010 and I know that your research broadly found that there were incredible disparities, and I’m not going to pass that off or forgive it. But I’m just going to ask you because you mentioned you’ve done some follow ups. That was before we had the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, before we started discussing the word genocide in this country. And before there was as much awareness into just how awful the problem was. When you revisited this research, what did you find?

Kristen I guess yeah, like you said, there were some changes. I think there has been a shift in terms of understanding, but I still don’t see it being equitable coverage. Like, I’m still seeing a lot of the disparities playing out. I can tell you some of the research that I’ve been doing since then. So I started tracking the killings and suspicious deaths of women and girls in Canada in 2017. So I was just doing a database that I was keeping on my own of names and different information. And I kept that on a daily basis right through to the beginning of COVID.

And even in those cases, I would have articles again that were really long and that were really detailed and that just had a lot of information, a lot of time and effort. You could tell it was a big story. It wasn’t just sort of a little bit of a bulletin or an update, that still remains. And I still see a lot of construction of the disappearances and deaths of Indigenous women as being either something that’s an Indigenous issue, like ‘that’s something that happens in that community’, which is completely ignoring the context and conditions that create violence in the first place.

Or also that there’s like that, ‘this is a personal failure, a bad choice’. It’s unfortunate, it’s tragic, but it’s a result of something that that person did. And typically that’s, like women who were doing anything that falls outside of a particular norm of respectability. So in the sex trade, using drugs, partying, out with friends. I still see a lot of the same types of underlying current of like, well, if women didn’t do bad things, bad things wouldn’t happen to them.

Jordan Did you follow the coverage of Gabby Petito in the United States?

Kristen I did. Yes.

Jordan How did you feel?

Kristen I was quiet about it. I actually found on social media, I thought people’s responses were really on point and the call outs were really great. And I felt like I didn’t actually have that much to add to the conversation.

Jordan What kinds of stuff were you hearing and seeing from folks who are in marginalized communities around the hype and the coverage of Gabby’s case?

Kristen Yeah. So what I was just seeing was a lot of folks, just like calling out, recognizing, acknowledging that this case, while tragic, of course, I fight to end violence against women and femicide all the time. But at the same time, we can say that is really bad what happened to Gabby, but also recognize that there are a lot, or disproportionate number of racialized, Women of Color, poor women, who are more likely to be targeted for violence, who we’re not paying attention to, who aren’t getting the breaking news updates and consistent day to day coverage that you would see.

Just people saying, like, ‘hey, what happens when our kin and our loved one goes missing?’ We don’t have this. There’s no direct line to the entire world. It can be a real struggle for folks to engage with media and to tell stories in their own ways. And I think that’s something people are just saying like, ‘listen, we see the disparity’. We see the quality of the coverage that’s given to missing white women and Gabby specifically, and saying, like, no, this is not acceptable. If we want to have solidarity and ending gender based violence, we need to be also emphasizing the voices of the people who are most directly impacted by systems that create violence.

Jordan But to your point, it didn’t really stop any of the coverage from being excessive.

Kristen Yeah. And that is also something I’ve seen, like in cases in Canada, too. So, like, if a young, white, blonde, fits all those descriptors, goes missing, like, we’ll have the coverage of the disappearance, of the search, of the person being found, of the man hunt for the offender, of the arrest, of the preliminary trial, of the trial, of the sentencing. It just continues. It’s newsworthy forever in ways that we don’t see for other missing and murdered folks.

Jordan Well, I’ll ask you this as a member of the media who is trying to do the right thing, how much of this is inherent bias and racism, as we’ve discussed, and probably some of it is, how much of it is also an implicit understanding of the fact that amongst their audience, these are the stories that get clicks? These are the stories that get shared, these are the stories that bring them an audience and thus advertising and revenue.

Kristen Yeah. And it’s a money making business. And at the end of the day, that’s the purpose. Like, I don’t watch television news at this point, but I follow media, social media quite a bit. I read the comments section, unfortunately, a lot of the time. And the comments, they’re just brutal. They are mean, they are hurtful, they are victim blaming, they are racist. And for me, like, that part is still shocking. So even if the article itself is not problematic necessarily, or does a good job of providing context or does some humanizing work. The comments are not necessarily going to be fair or safe or equitable, and that’s something that I see pretty steadily is that I’m horrified by what I’m seeing in the comment section.

Jordan Last question for you is where does change have to come from on this? Because, as mentioned, we’ve had an inquiry, we’ve had prominent voices speaking up. We know that this is inequitable. It continues to happen, and it feels like the problem is so diffuse that the only blame that can be placed is kind of on us, the collective consumers of this kind of news.

Kristen Yeah. I just think it’s because these conditions that create the violence in the first place, so the misogyny and the racism and the colonialism and the poor bashing, all of those things together are just so weaved into the fabric of society that they are diffuse. Like, we see them everywhere playing out, and it’s difficult to say, like, okay, we’re going to stop it in the media by taking these five tips and then making sure all of our articles meet those.

I think it’s really complicated and it’s difficult to know exactly where to start. I find just, alternatives to mainstream media is like what a lot of folks are relying on. Or Indigenous folks are just telling their own stories without the middleman of the white person like me or the white reporter who’s telling their stories. And I think that’s really important, too, where folks are just like, we’re telling our stories, we’re creating those spaces ourselves and carving out some safety there. And I think that’s really important. But I agree it’s really difficult to pinpoint exactly where to intervene because the interventions need to happen everywhere all the time.

Jordan Everywhere all the time is a pretty good summation of how we need to do better on this. Thank you so much, Kristen, for sharing your research and your time with us.

Kristen Yeah. Thank you.

Jordan That was Kristen Gilchrist-Salles. That was the big story. For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. Talk to us anytime via email thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!].

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Thanks so much for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.