The homicide of young traveler Gabby Petito in the United States sparked controversy over the disproportionate attention that would be given to missing white women.
With her boyfriend Brian Laundrie, Gabby Petito, 22, had gone on an adventure in a campervan in the grandiose landscapes of the West. He had returned alone, ten days before the family of the young woman reported her disappearance, and remains today untraceable.
The story of this tragic young blonde American is also sadly commonplace in a country where hundreds of thousands of people go missing every year. Yet it has crystallized attention.
On the many pictures of their trip shared by the couple on social networks, they were all smiles, barefoot in a canyon or surveying the ocher rocks of western scenery.
890 million views for the hashtag #GabbyPetito
The hashtag #GabbyPetito had nearly 890 million views on TikTok on Thursday. In fact, in the midst of a deluge of sometimes whimsical videos, some users seem to have moved the investigation forward. One couple reported in a YouTube video that they saw Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie’s van in Grand Teton National Park.
These YouTubers, according to US media, were heard by the police, and the body of the victim was found near the place they had reported.
“Social networks are like a kidnapping alert, but more effective,” said Michael Alcazar, retired New York police inspector and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
This level of vigilance is rarely achieved when an African American or Native American goes missing.
“Missing white woman syndrome”
The disappearances of young white women, especially those “relatively wealthy” and who “correspond to the criteria of beauty” are covered more by the media than those of people from ethnic minorities, according to lawyer and criminologist Zach Sommers, who conducted research on “missing white woman syndrome”.
50% of the articles he studied were about a white woman, a category that only accounts for about 30% of those missing, according to his estimates.
Gabby Petito, seen as young and “fragile”, corresponds to the idea of ​​the “damsel in distress” who “needs to be saved”, an image “very present in American culture,” he says.
According to Zach Sommers, other factors explain the attention paid to Gabby Petito, including the abundance of content accessible to the curious via his accounts on social networks, and the video of a police intervention dated August, on which we sees the couple arguing. The murky role played by her boyfriend has also given “a natural suspect” to the public, he argues.
Still, American society “associates people of color more with crime and it may not be seen as worthy of interest when a black individual goes missing,” says Zach Sommers.
“Among the people who decide what becomes information, there is not enough diversity”, further advances Martin Reynolds, of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, to explain this disparity.