Media 'Missing White Woman syndrome'

[shmike]

Originally Posted by EpyonXero

Michelle Knight was 20 years old when she went missing and the her family assumed she simply left. This article compared the two underaged victims as you would expect both of them to be treated similarly as missing teenagers.

The cops assumed she left and convinced much of her family of the same.

[EpyonXero]

Originally Posted by shmike

The cops assumed she left and convinced much of her family of the same.

She was an adult and there was reason to believe shed left on her own. Its an apple to oranges comparison.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/201..._that_she.html

You can understand why, at first, Michelle Knight’s disappearance might not have struck the police as particularly suspicious. Knight was a legal adult when she vanished, and there was nothing stopping her from leaving home and severing all family connections. What’s more, the police report into her disappearance notes that Knight “had a mental condition and frequently was confused by her surroundings,” which perhaps led them to believe she might have wandered off. News reports indicate that most of Knight’s family members believed that she left of her own accord, which means that—her mother’s flyers notwithstanding—there probably wasn’t much family pressure on police to advance the investigation.

If Knight had been a minor when she vanished, then her case would undoubtedly have received more police attention. As I wrote earlier today, a 14-year-old girl named Ashley Summers disappeared from west Cleveland in 2007 after a fight with her family. Though she was deemed a runaway at the time, the investigation into her disappearance nevertheless continued, and her case was consistently mentioned in connection with those of Berry and DeJesus.

Why wasn’t Knight linked with the other missing girls? In hindsight, it seems clear that the Cleveland police should have done more to look for her, especially considering the subsequent disappearances of Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus from the exact same neighborhood where Knight was last seen. To be sure, we still don’t have all that much information about the case, and it’s possible the police did in fact tie the three disappearances together. But at this point, it looks like Michelle Knight slipped through the cracks.