Over the course of the last fifteen months I have learned an incredible amount from women’s rights activists and journalists that have been covering Violence Against Women and Girls long before I ended up working along side of them. Many of these incredible women have spent decades on the front lines and have the scars to prove it. They have been generous with their time, support and advice. Specifically Ngozi Fulani from Sistah Space has rightfully and constructively challenged me to consider the experiences of the community she serves and why it took a white woman being a victim of a horrific crime for me to remove my blinders and step up to fight for women’s safety.
It is incredibly hard to know how to appropriately react to missing women other than sharing tweets which feels woefully inadequate. I have also learned to pause when assumptions are made about causes of death as I’ve recorded podcasts about male violence against women when it turns out that male violence was not the cause of the victim’s death.
In this piece by The Independent’s Maya Oppenheimer who does amazing work highlighting the injustices women face in the UK; I think they make a pretty significant error. By not naming the victim Vanessa (whose last name is not known or released) in the headline or subhead until the second paragraph; she becomes another woman’s plight overshadowed by the murder of Sarah Everard. Without saying her name and the details that make Vanessa relatable; the story continues to get buried.
It is well documented that when women of colour are the victims of crime, they rarely recieve the attention or outrage of a middle class white woman. Having heard first hand from Mina Smallman how horrifically her family was treated when reporting that her daughters Bibaa and Nicole were missing. The fact that her younger daughter’s partner actually found her girls because the police didn’t even bother to look with never stop infuriating me; watching Two Daughters on BBC, Mina gave us access to her two beautiful daughter’s light and love and lives and not just the crime that took them.
As Ngozi said in the piece: ‘When Sarah Everard went missing, I had as much as concern as everyone else did. I don’t look at a colour chart if a woman goes missing. When she went missing every media outlet covered it”.
I don’t know how we fix what the media reports or how they report it and it feels problematic to criticise the only national paper covering Vanessa’s case. But until we make the same amount of noise when a Black woman disappears, we have to continue to be critical and examine how these cycles are perpetuated and continue to ask uncomfortable questions.
I hope someone has some information about Vanessa and she comes home safely to her loved ones. In the meantime, please say her name and share her picture; we owe it to every single woman that doesn’t make it home.