"You Know Madeleine McCann. These Missing Girls Of Color Are Cold Cases, Too."

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To me, it’s not that it’s a white vs child of color issue. It’s the sensationalism factor. Two of the children were abducted on holiday. Another was abducted out of her own home. The girls of color were just walking around their own neighborhoods and plenty of white kids have disappeared like that too with no extended media coverage.
 
Definitely, but race does explain at least a small part of it. People tend to be more sympathetic when it’s especially a child of their race because it brings about more empathy (‘that could be my child/niece/etc’). As there are more white people, I’m not surprised.
 
I have pondered this phenomenon from time to time — why do some cases get lots of coverage and others none at all? — and this is what I wrote about it a long time ago (Sun. 06/16/02 01:20:13 PM):

“It seems to me that a case like these is more likely to get saturation coverage the more the child fits the description cute, white, middle- or upper-class, blonde girl .”
 
Being rich --and most rich people in Western society are white-- also gives people an idea of how to keep a case in the news. It seems to me that the McCanns hired publicity people along with lawyers when their daughter went missing.
 
I’ve actually seen a pretty large amount of coverage of young girls of color going missing in cities where there’s a large population of people of color. Often, the cases are solved pretty quickly.

When the cases grow cold, I agree that it’s the people who are either more well-off or have some connections with local government, law enforcement etc who know how to keep a case in the news for months or years. If the child, regardless of race or ethnicity, is from a family that has limited resources or is unstable, the story won’t persist.

Also, when a kid is just walking around their neighborhood which, in the case of lower economic spectrum people, often has a lot of crime anyway, and the kid disappears, it doesn’t get the same kind of attention as when some well-off child disappears from an area that is supposed to be safe.
 
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I think it is more to do with economics and social standing.

I remember when a string of prostitutes were being killed in my area there was almost a sense of relief that ‘normal’ societal women weren’t being targeted. Completely horrible of course, no one should have to worry about serial killers, but your own protective instinct allows that relief and justification so you feel that it could never happen to you.

It is the same when children get kidnapped. If it is someone in the same ‘standing’ we get all nervous (race doesn’t really come into play). But when it happens to a poorer family, or a family with known social problems the immediate reaction (despite being wrong) is a feeling that the famies circumstances led to the crime. If they didn’t “do drugs/live in that area/have so many kids etc” then it wouldn’t have happened.

Wrong. But a completely natural human reaction imo.
 
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Funny, the priest today in his homily mentioned the way we try to explain why bad things happen to people. His followers asked about this, and He said, do you think all those people killed by the falling tower were big sinners?

The rain falls on the just and unjust alike, so we search for other solutions to gain a sense of control.

The highly publicized cases all seem to happen despite the apparently safe situation: child taken from home, etc. It is disturbing and maybe stays in the news because of the combination of “despite everything they did, this still happened,” and “what more could they have done to keep their child even safer?”

Along with publicity know-how.
 
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