The Era of Lost (White) Girls: On Body and Event

Abstract

rebecca wanzo is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. She is currently completing a book manuscript about sentimental political storytelling in the United States forthcoming from suny Press.

Racial and gender differences in missing children’s recovery chances

“…This research is informed by the “missing white girl syndrome” conjecture that media allocate disproportionate time and resources to the coverage of missing white girls, anticipating greater public interest in these cases [3, 5]. Several studies identify large coverage differences consistent with this hypothesis among small, non-representative samples of missing women [4, 6, 7, 9]. [8] carry out a large-scale test of the hypothesis using FBI data on missing children.…”

The Differential Representation of Latina and Black Female Victims in Front-Page News Stories: A Qualitative Document Analysis

“…and warm” (Landrine, 1985, p. 72). Moreover, White women are often described as good mothers (Wanzo, 2008). Given such stereotypes, it is unsurprising that individuals express stronger negative beliefs about Blacks than Whites when taking race-implicit-association tests 2 (McConnell & Leibold, 2001), and both high- and low-prejudiced people identify the same stereotypical traits for Blacks when asked to do so (Devine & Elliot, 1995).…”

“…Among victims, prior media analyses indicate there is a good girl/bad girl dichotomy that appears in news stories (Gilchrist, 2010; see also Meyers, 1997). To explain, White females are often portrayed or viewed as “ideal” or “worthy” victims (Christie, 1986; Gekoski, Gray, & Adler, 2012), and “words such as ‘perfect,’ ‘ideal,’ ‘angelic,’ ‘golden,’ and ‘fairy tale’” are used to paint a lauded portrait of their lives (Wanzo, 2008, p. 99) and their innate goodness (Pritchard & Hughes, 1997). Importantly, “ideal victims” elicit large amounts of sympathy from media outlets (Jeanis & Powers, 2016).…”

The representation of women and girls of color in United States crime news

“…In reality, Black females have higher rates of victimization than white females (Bureau of Justice Statistics, ) and Latinas (Catalano, ), but the media underrepresent their victimizations (Moody et al, ; Wanzo, ). The news media often characterize Black female victims as “bad people” (Meyers, )—specifically, they are described as bad mothers, bad wives, or as generally deviant (Slakoff & Brennan, ).…”

“…In reality, Black females have higher rates of victimization than white females (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009) and Latinas (Catalano, 2006), but the media underrepresent their victimizations (Moody et al, 2009;Wanzo, 2008).…”