Missing White Woman Syndrome

Missing white woman syndrome (MWWS) is the disproportionate degree of coverage in television, radio, newspaper and magazine reporting of an adversity, most often a missing person case, involving a young, white, upper-middle class (frequently blonde) woman or girl. This degree of coverage is usually contrasted with cases concerning a missing male, or missing females of other ethnicities, socioeconomic classes or physical attractiveness.

Read more about Missing White Woman Syndrome:  Cited Instances, In The Iraq War

Famous quotes containing the words missing, white, woman and/or syndrome:

    Every time an ashtray is missing from a hotel, they don’t come looking for you. But let a diamond bracelet disappear in France and they shout John Robie, the Cat. You don’t have to spend every day of your life proving your honesty, but I do.
    John Michael Hayes (b.1919)

    While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud, onward march, the dark races will yield and serve, perforce. But let the white man once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the dark races will at once attack him, to pull him down into the old gulfs.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.
    Helene Deutsch (1884–1982)

    Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others—first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enormous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one’s own interests and desires. Carried to its “perfection,” it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.
    Jean Baker Miller (20th century)