"Without a Trace" addresses the 'missing blonde' issue

[undeterred]

I don't know if anyone else saw this last night but they did an episode where a young black man and a young white woman both disappeared at exactly the same time. The episode depicted how the press directed all of its attention towards the missing white girl, thus generating more leads and thereby getting more police resources. The mother of the missing black teenager gets upset about it but it does little good.

Both are 18 year olds who turn out to be involved in things their parents know nothing about.

At the end of the episode we find out that one has been found dead and the other alive, and the episode ends with the agent walking towards the two moms- the viewer never finds out which one gets the bad news.

Powerful stuff.

[WinkyDink]

1. Sounds like an unfortunate race-based dichotomy...on the show.

Some crimes grab our attention; some don't.

[xultar]

2. Yeah. Missing white girls grab it. Missing anyone else doesn't.

[Spazito]

3. It was a very good episode....

reflecting the truth for sure.

[undeterred]

4. Its not easy to do this in an hour

and of course the issues of gender and race were not separated. I do think people show more concern for a teenage girl who goes missing than a teenage boy. That is debatable, while the difference in race is inexcusable. But I give them credit for acknowledging the issue on a show that deals with missing persons every single week. Press attention makes a huge difference to the family and it can make a huge difference to the outcome of a case, though not always.

[Spazito]

6. While watching the show, it vividly brought to mind the

media frenzy over the missing woman in Aruba while there were other missing women in the US, women of color, who received no media coverage beyond small local news.

I thought the episode was very wise to focus the episode in a way that brought home how the media fails to do it's job fairly for all it's citizens.


In Canada, we have an ongoing trial of a mass murderer who killed prostitutes, and it is increasingly clear he was able to get away with it for years because the women were considered, imo, "throwaways" by both the media and the police and, therefore, not worthy of the same concern as other Canadians.

[undeterred]

8. Thats terrible but true.

And the slant has always been toward a "good innocent white female from a good family".

Years ago the sister of a friend of mine was murdered by a serial killer in Chicago. She fit the stereotype of a nice girl- she was even blond- and there was a lot of attention from the media and community support.

A few years later it was discovered that a man named John Wayne Gacy had sexually assaulted and murdered over 30 young men and boys and buried them on his property- not too far from where my friend's sister was killed. Some of the families of these young men came forward and said "When we reported our son missing we were ignored or told he was a runaway. When someone reports a daughter missing the entire community goes out to search for her. Why are the lives of sons worth less than daughters?" I guess it was assumed boys were invulnerable... but they aren't. And though prostitutes may choose a dangerous way of life, that means they are even more vulnerable, not less.

[Berry Cool]

5. I didn't see it, but I was wondering

whether racism played into it in any other ways. Was anyone shown assuming that "the white woman just disappeared because she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time," whereas "the black man probably disappeared because he was hanging out with the wrong people" or asking "Was he involved in any way with crime or drugs?"

I think that's another form of racism we don't usually think about that much. A young white woman disappears, and people are likely to think she was living an average life untouched by crime, that some bad guy just snatched her out of the blue. A young black man disappears, and the first thing people suspect is that it happened because he was up to no good somehow.

[undeterred]

7. Well the police setup was interesting

because while there was a white male directly involved in the case, there was a black woman above him making some of the calls about how many people were assigned to work the case and it was favoring the white girl.

When they started questioning the black teens parents I think the questions did seem that way at first.

I think the media favoring the girls disappearance was definitely because they presumed she was an innocent victim of circumstances.

But ultimately it turned out that both teens got into things over their heads- and 18 is not really a child not really an adult. I think the show tried to be pretty evenhanded in showing that you never really know what kind of secrets people might have, and that a mothers grief is a mothers grief, black or white.

[Berry Cool]

9. That's good, then. A life is a life, a death is a death, and grief is grief.

And to add to the above--yes, it is indeed sad when it seems that a serial killer can get away with the crimes indefinitely so long as the people being murdered are on the fringes or the outside of society: prostitutes, homeless people, mentally ill people, drug addicts walking the street doing anything to get another fix. People whose families (if they have any) have no idea where they are, and thus will not ask after them or notice if they vanish. When they turn up dead someday, and become a body on a slab in the morgue, they are still people. If a bunch of street people end up killed, why isn't more effort put sooner into finding out why?