Fatima Olodo is missing. She has been gone since Friday the 4th of March. That’s more than three months since Fatima last went about her day to day life, since Fatima’s family and friends have known with any degree of certainty that she was safe. Perhaps you haven’t heard her name until now – the mainstream media has barely made a whisper about Fatima disappearing – but here are the details: Fatima has short dark hair, and brown eyes. She was 41 years old at the time of disappearance. Fatima is from Broxbourne, Hertfordshire.
And Fatima is black, which limits not only the worth society places on her life, but her subsequent potential as a news story.
Think back over the last few years and picture the faces of missing persons that you saw on the evening news, read about in the paper. If you consider what most of them had in common, it becomes clear that they were not simply a random selection broadly representative of missing persons.
That Madeleine McCann went missing is a tragedy. Yet it is also tragic that Elizabeth Ogungbayibi – a girl similar in age to Madeleine, who went missing nine months before her – vanished and received not a fraction of the coverage at the time of her disappearance, let alone in the following years.
This is not arbitrary: research shows that Black children receive a mere 20% of the overall news coverage devoted to missing children. Natalee Holloway, an American teenager who went missing during her graduation holiday, was the subject of extensive reporting. LaToyia Figueroa, a Black and Hispanic woman who went missing in the same year as Natalee, was in comparison ignored by the media despite her being five months pregnant at the time of disappearance.
Fatima, Elizabeth, and LaToyia are not alone – the disappearances of women of colour often go underreported by the press because they do not fit neatly into the media-defined categories of ‘innocent’ or ‘victim’ the way white women and girls do. Since the media so frequently dehumanises Black and brown women, their stories simply cannot be reworked into the classic narrative of damsel in distress.
As seasoned journalist Eugene Robinson says, “a damsel must be white…. She must be attractive – also non-negotiable. Her economic status should be middle class or higher, but an exception can be made in the case of wartime. Put all this together, and you get 24-7 coverage. The disappearance of a man, or of a woman of color, can generate a brief flurry, but never the full damsel treatment.”
Social scientists have dubbed this phenomenon Missing White Woman Syndrome, proposing that race and class define the volume of coverage bestowed upon missing women in relation to their degree of socioeconomic privilege. That is to say, white middle-class women receive disproportionately high media coverage. Even Sir Ian Blair, former chief of the London Metropolitan Police, was aware and critical of the mainstream media’s “institutional racism”.
Every day that Fatima goes unaccounted for is nothing short of a tragedy as she misses out on her own life, an ongoing source of pain for the people who love her. There is an undeniable horror in the state of a missing person – perpetual uncertainty with no guarantee of their return, safe or otherwise, of closure for their loved ones.
If you have any information on Fatima, please contact Hertfordshire Constabulary.
