The color of victimhood

The public's uneven interest in various missing young women has set off a useful debate. By "the public," I mean the media. The question is whether the cable channels, magazines and tabloids care mostly about victims who are white, and little about similar tragedies involving blacks or Hispanics.

The coverage has been nonstop for Natalee Holloway, the 18-year-old blonde from Birmingham, Ala., who vanished during a high-school trip to Aruba. By contrast, the disappearance of LaToyia Figueroa, a 24-year-old black woman from Philadelphia, has drawn relatively little attention. Her father and bloggers have made an issue of this lopsided treatment.

The national media obsessed over Laci Peterson, the missing 27-year-old from Modesto, Calif., whose pregnant body eventually washed up along San Francisco Bay. Peterson was white and college-educated. But Evelyn Hernandez, 24, was also pregnant, and her body was found in the same bay. The media, however, paid scant attention to this immigrant from El Salvador.

So the question can't be avoided: All things being equal, do the media care a lot more about white victims than about their darker-skinned sisters? The quick answer is yes. But in the cases of Figueroa, Hernandez and many other poor women, all else was not equal.

Both Figueroa and Hernandez were about to have their second child out of wedlock. Americans may have become more accepting of single motherhood, but they also know the following: Women who go this route live more dangerously than mothers with husbands. And let's face it, a death is less newsworthy when it occurs in a war zone than in an American shopping mall.

Single women who have a succession of children by different men are operating in a sociological war zone. When terrible things happen to them, the people who love them grieve, of course. But their stories would be far more shocking to the general public had they been cocooned in a stable marriage.

Figueroa was by all accounts a loving and wonderful woman. She was devoted to her daughter and worked hard at a restaurant. The same goes for Hernandez, who was in the country legally, took fine care of her son and worked at a variety of jobs. But they were both pregnant by men to whom they had no legal ties. The annals of crime are stacked with stories of men who killed their pregnant girlfriends (not a few of them white), rather than pay for child support. In both the Figueroa and Hernandez cases, the father is a "person of interest" to police.

Note how in sensational crimes, the media fixate more on betrayals by people close to the victims than on the victims themselves. The upper-middle-income trappings no doubt spurred interest in the Peterson saga. But what activated this story was the deep suspicion, later conviction, that Laci's husband had murdered his pregnant wife. Without this storyline, Laci Peterson would have been lost among the other 200,000 Americans who are reported missing every year.

The frenzy over the child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey was mostly about her parents, who taught their little girl to do sexy dances onstage. About 90 percent of the interest in the missing Chandra Levy was stirred by her ties to a congressman.

The lurking question in the Natalee Holloway story is how a high-school senior on a class trip could be allowed to leave a nightclub in the wee hours with three strange men. (The whole idea of a class trip to a swinging Caribbean island also seems strange to old-fashioned types.) One expects high-school kids to have supervision.

Underlying the heartbreak in the Figueroa and Hernandez and similar cases is that the victims were all alone, and that made their stories less compelling. Had the women been white and the other particulars the same, these situations would have commanded only marginally more attention.

All this does not absolve newsrooms of the responsibility to better examine crimes involving minorities. I'm convinced that a black middle-class suburbanite who was pregnant and found murdered would not receive nearly the attention showered on Laci Peterson. And she should.

But the reality is that race is just one element in the kind of story that excites the cable channels. As victims, abducted women are all equal. The details that make their cases newsworthy are not.

Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com