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Paging Ms. Van Susterns

Jill

I’m just gonna quote directly from Gawker:

Last week, a group of six New Yorkers were on a Caribbean vacation in St. Maarten. Two of them were brutally beaten — one, Dick Jefferson, a 51-year-old top producer at the CBS Evening News, is out of the hospital but now has a titanium plate in his head; the other, a 25-year-old researcher there, remains in intensive care with brain injuries. Why were they beaten? Because they’re gay, and the attackers had earlier that night been thrown out of a bar for heckling Smith and his boyfriend, Justin Swenson. ABCNews.com did a thorough story earlier this week, which made an interesting point:

The part of the island of St. Maarten where the assault took place is Dutch territory in the Caribbean, just like the island of Aruba. It was almost a year ago that Natalee Holloway disappeared in Aruba. Since then, her parents have had an exasperating odyssey through the island’s Dutch legal system. Smith’s family and friends are bracing for a similar journey.

St. Maarten police, Jefferson said, initially did not want to investigate the incident.

So. A promising 25-year-old American was beaten nearly to death while on vacation, and an impassive Dutch-colonial government is unwilling or uninterested to adequately investigate or prosecute the crime. We’re sure the cable networks will be as excited as when Natalee Holloway, a promising 19-year-old American, disappeared while on vacation and an impassive Dutch-colonial government is unwilling or uninterested to adequately investigate or prosecute the crime.

After all, it’s not like they would care more about a Southern blonde girl than a New York gay of indeterminate hair color? Of course not.

Alleged Hate Crime in Paradise [ABCNews.com]

7 thoughts on Paging Ms. Van Susterns

  1. Not that the Natalee Holloway story was of pressing international importance, but I would guess that the intensive coverage had something to do with the fact that she was missing, and there was therefore a mystery.

    Cable news coverage is certainly not above hyping lurid crime stories, but I think that the “pretty white girls” meme ultimately hurts feminism. First of all, pretty white women who commit crimes are also disproportionately covered, but no one complains about that; you’d think that the average statutory rapist is a beautiful 25-year-old blonde woman like Pamela Turner.

    Second of all, it feeds into a general trend of making women’s stories less important. I’ve actually heard Jill Carroll compared to Natalee Holloway; sure, she’s an accomplished journalist, but she’s female, so it must be a “pretty white girl” tabloid story, not an important one like, say, that of Daniel Pearl.

  2. I actually agree. The “pretty white girl” criticisms of the Natalee Holloway case bothered me quite a bit. Isn’t the point not that Natalee’s disappearance shouldn’t have gotten so much attention, but that other disappeared people should get that same kind of attention?

    So I’m not posting this to criticize the Holloway coverage, but rather to draw attention to other cases that have gone under-reported.

  3. Isn’t the point not that Natalee’s disappearance shouldn’t have gotten so much attention, but that other disappeared people should get that same kind of attention?

    If every missing person got the kind of attention that Natalee Holloway got, there would be no time to talk about anything else. And since there are quite a few important topics that don’t involve missing people, I don’t think that every (or even any) missing person should get that much airtime.

  4. Ugh. The whole “where the white women at?” hysteria that grips the cable news nets is horribly bad. Not only does it elevate what are essentially common, albeit personally tragic, stories into national news, it reinforces the idea that women, and only women (and young, white, pretty ones at that) are victims of crime.

    For instance, you probably remember the whole Nixzmary Brown story of a couple of months ago (Nixzmary was an abused 7-year-old beaten to death by her mother’s boyfriend and mother; the City’s child-welfare agencies had failed her). The tabloid coverage focused on what an “angel” she was, stripping her of her humanity and putting her on a pedestal; there was a huge outpouring of grief and concern for her. Yet shortly afterwards, a little boy was beaten to death in similar circumstances. You’d think it might trigger a similar outcry due to the similar circumstances (both beating and official neglect), but no. Because little boys don’t fit into the “innocent angel” narrative quite so well.

  5. Exactly Zuzu, its not so much about who is going to get more coverage, its about the mythology promulgated by the news media that only white people are worthy of anyone’s concern. Or white women in particular. Remember the unceasing obsession with the upper middle class woman who ran from her marriage? Jesus, I thought it would never end — and I don’t even watch tv or get cable. Everywhere I went, the gym, walmart, a bar; the damn tube was beating that dead horse to a pulp.

    Is it any coincidence that this occurs most often on visual media?

  6. Remember the unceasing obsession with the upper middle class woman who ran from her marriage? Jesus, I thought it would never end — and I don’t even watch tv or get cable. Everywhere I went, the gym, walmart, a bar; the damn tube was beating that dead horse to a pulp.

    And the arc of that story was quite interesting — while it appeared that she was missing, a victim, there was a huge outpouring of support and concern, but once it was apparent that she’d run off on her own, suddenly she was the object of incredible anger.

    Now, I was pissed at her for inventing a brown couple to be the kidnappers, but it seemed like Nancy Grace and the people back home were livid that they didn’t have a white-woman-in-peril story to flog, they only had a woman who dared run from her engagement.

  7. Wasn’t it the whole “white-woman-in-peril” thing that was used in the early 20th Century to justify countless lynchings in the American South?

    *Shakes head* I hate people. Have I mentioned this lately?

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