When I saw a tweet saying that 14 black and latina girls went missing in Washington, D.C. and there had not been any national news coverage, I couldn’t understand why. When I later found out that not only did that specific tweet get the timeframe wrong but was also using the wrong images of the missing girls, I was furious all this conversation was taking place over misinformation.
By now, you’ve probably heard about these missing girls – all teenagers that disappeared over the span of two weeks – because the outcry that’s taken place over social media has caused major news organizations, like ABC, to finally cover the story. A lot of the coverage points out that the Metropolitan Police Department of D.C. confirmed the number of missing girls is not out of the norm, and that it’s actually lower than it’s been in the past. That’s where the actual problem is. Apparently it’s normal for young girls of color to go missing.
According to The Rolling Stone, D.C.’s police department recently made efforts to increase transparency and in doing so began posting all missing children reports via social media. By taking this action, it became incredibly easy to see the disparity between the number of children of color who go missing and the coverage that they receive from the media. I do not think that the D.C. police were lacking in effort to find these young girls — their social media efforts help attest to that. According to its website, there have been 848 missing person reports filed with the department in 2017, 549 of them were juveniles. As of March 29, 18 juvenile cases remain open.
What this recent string of missing persons did bring to light is how many black children go missing. According to the FBI’s crime statistics, in 2014, almost 37 percent of missing persons in the U.S. under the age of18 were black. That’s something to be upset about, considering that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 13.3 percent of the entire population is black. Another large cause of concern: most of these cases don’t receive Amber Alerts.
While it’s true that there are specific requirements that must be met for an Amber Alert, ABC News legal correspondent Sunny Hostin pointed out on Good Morning America that part of the reason a lot of Amber Alerts aren’t put out is because children of color are often labeled runaways. In the case that these girls are runaways, they are put at higher risk of being forced into sex trafficking the longer they are missing.
Assuming that a missing child of color is a runaway and not being alarmed by the supposedly normal rate of disappearing young, teen girls is a problem with U.S. society.
According to the Huffington Post, black women are more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than white women. Yet, thinking about this past year, I can remember at least two nationally covered rape cases for white women and not one for a black woman. I can recall at least three missing children cases that were covered nationally during 2016, and guess what. They were all white.
It seems like there aren’t enough who care about the adolescents going missing in this country who are of color — and it’s widespread. I went on to the Fort Lauderdale Police Department’s missing person database and specifically looked at juveniles. The link that connects to the PDF document of Kalijah Bonelli’s report, who has been missing for almost a year, spells his name incorrectly. While the one letter difference may have been a typo, I find it hard to believe that no one caught or could have fixed it by now.
The spread of information about the missing D.C. girls may not have been fully accurate, but it did open up a large and important conversation about how the U.S. handles its media coverage and care for people of color. And while I beg the social media community to fact check and keep their information accurate before they share it, I applaud it for pushing forward an issue that we shouldn’t still have.
