Missing Children in the Media

Missing Children in the Media

In the news media we receive endless coverage of missing children. This comes in all formats. While standing in line at the grocery store the tabloids have a new victims face or an update on an existing trial. The nightly news and talk shows seem to virtually have no choice but to cover these stories. The Casey Anthony case has held our attention for quite a while now, and the murder of a female college student at Yale has caught everyone’s focus in the past month.

At first glance, it seems as if this were a good thing. The media is serving to raise the public awareness of vulnerable populations (as most of the coverage is devoted to female victims under the age of 18), and is giving a face to missing or exploited children. The common sentiment among the followers of these cases is one of sympathy and fear- these tragedies could befall any family.

When we look a bit deeper into the coverage of these cases however, we see that there is an element of selectivity in which cases get reported. First of all, most of the victims that we see on TV are middle to upper-class young white females. Initially that seems intuitive. Wouldn’t white girls get most of the coverage because they constitute the most victims? No, actually. Not even remotely close in fact. According to the National Crime Information Center (which is run by the FBI), in 2008 blacks totaled 211,921 in missing persons under the age of 18, while white missing children amounted to 25,333. That is suggests a massive discrepancy between what is actually going on and what we hear about. And we also rarely hear about missing and exploited children that come from poorer backgrounds, regardless of race. Perhaps this suggests that there is an expectation for these cases to occur in those populations, while it is considered "shocking" (and therefore news worthy) for tragedy to strike upper class whites.

So why don’t we hear about the cases of missing/exploited lower class minorities? One of the reasons is that these cases may go uninvestigated. Also, the families of the victims may not have the luxury of calling their own press conferences to garner publicity for their cases. I think that the biggest factor is in the fact that though whites do not comprise most of the victims in these cases, they are the largest population of consumers of this media programming. It seems as if the only lives that we grant agency to are the ones which are most viscerally relatable. This kind of ignorance can lead to the severe under representation in the public consciousness and in the media of the most vulnerable populations.

We are probably all familiar with Nancy Grace, the CNN host who on a nightly basis campaigns for the prosecution of suspected murderers and rapists. She has essentially made a career out of sensationalist coverage of the missing child cases that the public fixates on most readily. Her program demonstrates the under representation that I have addressed in this post. It is interesting to consider that people with media outlets like hers are gaining quite a bit financially from the very populations that she is alleging to protect, thus furthering the exploitation that she and others “fight” with righteous indignation.

Rusty Black