How news outlets cover female crime victims
News coverage of missing and murdered Indigenous women has been long criticized as spotty and superficial. The news media “largely ignore the victimizations of Native American females,” writes Slakoff, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Sacramento State University, in her 2020 paper, “The Representation of Women and Girls of Color in United States Crime News.”
A growing body of research demonstrates that missing white women typically draw significantly more media attention than missing minority women. The late PBS news anchor Gwen Ifill first used the term “Missing White Woman Syndrome” to describe this disparity in 2004.
Slakoff has written several papers investigating racial bias in news coverage.
In “The Differential Representation of Latina and Black Female Victims in Front-Page News Stories: A Qualitative Document Analysis,” published in Feminist Criminology in 2019, Slakoff and coauthor Pauline Brennan examine front-page stories that ran in four major newspapers — the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Houston Chronicle — in 2006.
They studied a total of 131 crime stories about female victims who were either white, Black or Hispanic. Seventy-five stories focused on white females, 35 were about Black female victims and 21 were about Hispanic female victims. There were too few front-page stories about females from other minority groups, including Indigenous women and girls, for analysis.
Slakoff and Brennan learned that in addition to publishing more front-page stories about white female victims, news coverage of white female victims was more likely to feature “sympathetic narratives.”
“In the stories about Latina and Black women and girls, we commonly saw themes around them being in an unsafe environment, essentially telling the audience that these Latina and Black women and girl victims were in environments that were unsafe. It’s essentially normalizing their victimization,” Slakoff told The Objective, a nonprofit newsroom that reports on inequity in journalism, in a 2021 interview.
“On the flip side,” she added, “in the stories about white women and girl victims, we were seeing mentions of the fact that they were in safe environments, that nothing like this ever happened in this area. So we argue that this really fosters sympathy for the white women and girls. ‘How could they protect themselves if they were already in the safe area? It’s so unexpected.’”
Next Friday, May 5, is Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons Awareness Day in the U.S.
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