What Is Missing White Woman Syndrome?

Think about the most infamous missing persons cases. Natalee Holloway vanished during a trip to Aruba, Chandra Levy disappeared while having an affair with a high-profile congressman, and Gabby Petito took social media by storm with a highly documented missing case. These were all tragedies, but what else do they have in common? They were all young, conventionally attractive white women. If this seems like a pattern, that’s because it is.

“Missing white woman syndrome” is the name given to news media’s tendency to prioritize missing person cases that involve white female victims. The term was coined by journalist Gwen Ifill at a conference in 2004. “I call it the missing white woman syndrome,” said Ifill at the conference. “If there’s a missing white woman, we are going to cover that every day.” 

“It is the idea that when someone goes missing, the decision-making processes that go into whether that person’s case receives coverage in the news media is inherently tied up in what that person looks like and where they come from,” said Zach Sommers, a law professor at Illinois Institute of Technology and a leading scholar on the missing white woman syndrome phenomenon.

But what fuels these disparities? Many scholars agree that it starts in the newsroom. Lack of diversity behind editorial desks continues to be an issue that influences how stories get told. In a 2022 Pew Research Center poll, 76% of journalists surveyed were white, and only 6% were black. This issue extends to Milwaukee – as of 2022, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s newsroom staff was 75% white and 11.1% black, according to the Journal Sentinel’s demographic reports.

“In those decision-making roles, you’re going to go by the norms you’re used to or accustomed to – based on your world, and the lens through which you see the world,” said Tannette Elie, managing editor of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and President of the National Association of Black Journalists-Milwaukee. “So if you have a situation where you don’t have people of color in those roles, then editors are going to go with their own bias in making decisions and determining what level of attention certain individuals might get.”

“There’s all sorts of psychological research showing that we gravitate to things that are familiar to us,” said Sommers. “Just sort of implicitly, if you have kind of a homogenous group of people in the editors’ room making these determinations, it’s not surprising that we might see over-representation of certain types of cases. If you have that composition of folks in the room, they see a case about a white girl, a white woman, they might kind of implicitly identify with that story in a way that they might not identify with another.”

However, the issue goes even deeper than that. It starts at the institutional construction of social identities – which the media can reinforce through who they choose to cover, and how. Race and gender are ultimately inseparable from the media coverage that victims receive, and they often dictate how their stories get told.

“In terms of media, since the dawn of time, women, girls, young girls, they’re the ones who are often portrayed as these sort of victims,” said Gabby Agustin, a media scholar and Master of Arts in Media Studies graduate from the University of Amsterdam. “People that need help, and need support. Who the public might get more sympathy for are white women, especially who are cisgender and able-bodied.”

“When we see a white girl or a white woman who’s gone missing, we are more likely as a society to say, ‘wow, look at this blameless victim who had something horrible happen to her,’” said Sommers. “We need to care about this, she needs to be rescued. We’re more likely to look at that case and say, ‘That could be my daughter or my neighbor.’”

When 22-year-old social media influencer Petito went missing during a road trip with her fiance in the summer of 2021, a media firestorm ensued, making her case the target of national attention for weeks on end. However, the extensive media coverage surrounding her disappearance called into question the disparities in attention that different missing persons cases are subjected to. Petito’s father has spoken out publicly about the lack of coverage that missing persons of color receive and is now helping to co-produce a TV program that highlights some of these underreported cases.

“This story was more sensationalized in news media,” said Agustin. “I definitely see more thought-pieces and more conversations about the missing white woman syndrome, and talking about the disparities between the coverage of missing people of color versus missing white people. It has definitely allowed people to be more educated and see more of the differences.”

“I found myself really enthralled with the story, wanting to know every day what happened to this young woman. That’s the power of the media,” said Elie. “She was this victim, and everybody felt so terrible about this tragedy. But the thing about it is, do you see women of color? Are they covered like that? Are their stories elevated to that level?”

An instance of missing white woman syndrome being felt in Milwaukee occurred as early as 2002. When 7-year-old Alexis Patterson went missing from her elementary school in Milwaukee, her story became the subject of much attention in the city but did not receive a story in national media until eight days after her disappearance. Just a month later, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped from her home in Salt Lake City. The same day she disappeared, her story was featured on both CNN and Fox News segments. Smart was found nine months later, but Patterson has yet to be located over two decades later.

When missing persons of color do end up being covered by the media, many feel as if their coverage is often biased and painted in a negative light. Journalists tend to focus less on their humanity, and more on any piece of background information that could degrade them.

“There’s a tendency to look at problems,” said Elie. “Chicago has had a slew of black women prostitutes, some of them to turn up missing in recent years. The coverage is looking at their problems – looking at, oh, she has a criminal background, or she did drugs, or what have you, instead of looking at that this is a woman, despite her problems. She didn’t deserve to be treated this way.”

In recent years, the rise of “true crime” media has emerged as an interesting development in the coverage of missing persons. Although it has sought to put crime media back into the hands of the people, it has continually fallen victim to institutionally flawed principles of journalism.

“I think producers really want to cover these ‘perfect victims’, like the Gabby Petito case,” said Agustin. “Mostly middle to upper-class white women are listening to these shows. They would find stories more compelling if the victim is kind of in the same demographic as them. I feel like now, there is coverage for missing people on true crime shows. It’s just a matter of – who are the missing people that you’re covering?”

For Agustin, a Filipino woman, the issue hits deep. She recalled the story of an indigenous friend of hers who had to report her disabled brother as missing, and then had to turn to social media to organize search efforts. 

“It’s like, damn,” said Agustin. “What if, worst case, something happens to me – will my story be covered in the news?”

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into missing people’s cases in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.