‘The missing white girl syndrome’: disappeared women and media activism

Abstract

The mainstream media play a vital role in constructing certain endangered young women as valuable ‘front-page victims’, while dismissing others as disposable. In this essay, I examine the techniques that activists can use to challenge media stereotypes of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims. Drawing on examples from the USA, central America, and Europe, I offer three practical methods for engaging in feminist media activism: the ‘diagnostic’, to provide a cultural vocabulary for unveiling and resisting media biases; the ‘theatrical’, to revive the lives of disenfranchised bodies in the public imagination; and the ‘archaeological’, to dig proactively for the human stories that have been buried beyond the margins.

Notes

1. America's Most Wanted. Online Resource, available: http://amw.com/missing_children/case.cfm?id=30448 (last accessed 11 March 2006).

2. Fox News.Com. Online Resource, available: http://websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19821&page=6&pp=25 (last accessed 2 March 2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Stillman

Sarah Stillman is a DPhil candidate at Oxford University, pursuing her thesis work on media representations of gender-based violence, particularly the historical precedents of the ‘Missing white girl syndrome’