I was reading the news last week when I saw a headline about Gabby Petito almost three years after her death. It made me think of all the women whose stories were told and those whose stories were not.
Studies have shown that when women of color disappear, they are far less likely to receive media attention.
Laura Barrón-López, Karina Cuevas, Mike Fritz- PBS.org
Gabby Petito is a household name.
I would say “was,” but her name and horrifically tragic story still trend on social media and come up in conversation years later.
In case you don’t know her name or her story, Gabrielle Venora Petito, known just as “Gabby Petito,” was murdered by her partner Brian Laundrie in 2021. They were on a road trip in August of 2021, and her social media followers quickly noticed something was off when she disappeared later that month. What was meant to be a four-month endeavor lasted less than two months, and all signs pointed to her spouse Brian Laundrie. Her body was found in a camping area in Wyoming. Laundrie was later deemed a person of interest, and an arrest warrant was issued. Laundrie went missing, but his remains were later found, and his cause of death was determined to be suicide. He left a confession in a notebook near where his remains were found.
If TikTok wasn’t a hit before 2021, it was undoubtedly a force to be reckoned with after her disappearance. Not only was Petito’s name a consistent headline on national news for months, but her story, conspiracies and infographics in her name blew up on social media, especially TikTok.
Even now, articles about her are published every few months, and there’s even a movie about her.
Everyone was, and is, all over #FindGabby.
Gabby Petito’s story is tragic and unfortunately common. No one is debating facts or trying to minimize her story because every missing woman, every missing person, deserves that same attention.
This does not happen, though, and it disproportionately affects Black, Latin, Hispanic and especially Indigenous women.
Shocked? That’s to be expected. These cases rarely, if ever, receive even half of the attention Gabby Petito’s did. This phenomenon is called “Missing White Woman Syndrome” or the “Missing White Woman Effect.”
Gwen Ifill, a Black American journalist, first mentioned the idea of “Missing White Woman Syndrome” in 2004 and highlighted the media’s failure to report on missing WOC the way it covers white women. Gabby Petito is a shining example of this idea.
Gabby Petito’s media coverage also sparked outrage from Indigenous women across Wyoming. They called out mass media for failing to cover hundreds of MMIW (missing and murdered Indigenous women) the way they covered Petito’s murder.
Tianna Wagon, a Northern Arapaho woman from Wyoming, has lost two sisters in less than three years to similar, senseless violence. Still, their cases, Wagon notes, “weren’t highlighted as much as Gabby’s.” Her sister Jocelyn Watt was found murdered in her home in January 2019. Her other sister Jade Wagon went missing just a year later and was eventually found dead on the Wind River Reservation. While her death was officially ruled an accident, her family is suspicious.
These cases are woefully tragic, but what makes them even worse, if possible, is that little to no attention is paid to them.
Not only do the families of these women lose a spouse, a sister, a cousin, a friend or a mother, but in failure to care for tragedies beyond those experienced by white women, the media perpetuates a loss of dignity in the most disrespectful way.
This failure to cover Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and Latin women is not a rarity but rather a terrifying reality for the families of these women across the United States.
Jade Wagon was one of over 700 missing Indigenous people in the past decade alone. According to a study by the University of Wyoming, 85% of those missing were minors, and over half of them were female. That same study noted that Indigenous people were almost 100% more likely to still be missing after a month than white people.
This idea, especially pertaining to Indigenous women, is not new, however. Perhaps the most damning aspect of this crisis is that there is literally “no definitive count of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S., in part because of underreporting of crimes and police reports that misclassify Native American women as white or Hispanic.“
Black and Hispanic/Latin women also experience this lack of coverage.
According to the NAACP, almost 40% of all missing people are minorities. Over 64,000 Black women are still missing across America. Despite only making up 13% of the population, Black Americans make up almost three times that percentage of missing people. There is a pronounced discrepancy between how missing white women are reported on in the news and how missing Black women are reported on, if reported on at all.
Missing Latinas and Hispanic women face the same issues missing Indigenous women do. The exact data on how many Latinas or Hispanic women are missing is hard to pinpoint because “local and national law enforcement often don’t gather data on missing Latinos like they do for white and Black people.” Often, these women are misclassified as white and nothing else, even though that is not an accurate representation of their ethnicity/race. It also takes Hispanic women and Latinas longer to make the news.
When Reina Carolina Morales Rojas went missing in Boston, it took the Boston Police Department six weeks (42 days) to release a public alert. While Victor Evans, deputy superintendent of the BPD, stated that the department was actively searching for her during that time, just not informing the public.
Julia Mejia, the first Latina to serve on the Boston City Council, “introduced a resolution calling on police to treat all missing persons equally.” The fact that this resolution would even be needed is shameful and, quite frankly, should be embarrassing to mass media and law enforcement across the United States.
To demand social equality seems obvious. It is a right.
To demand equality in treatment after death seems nonsensical, and yet it is seemingly necessary.
How many more BIPOC women need to go missing before their names become a headline, too?