“Even if people are found, it’s still an astronomical number.” Rivers, who created the Our Black Girls missing-persons website three years ago. “A chunk of those kids are actually found,” said Erika M. Statistics involving missing Hispanic people are more difficult to obtain, because they are classified as “white” in the federal data. More than 70,000 Black girls under age 18 were reported missing last year, according to the National Crime Information Center. There may be conscious and unconscious biases among law enforcement officers in cases involving Black people that result in less attention, Walsh said. Although Black children make up 14% of the nation’s children, they account for 31% of the center’s missing children reports, he said. Walsh said the center receives about 500 missing-person calls a week. It is more difficult when those who go missing don’t want to be found.”Ĭallahan Walsh, a child advocate at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said girls are often coaxed online and encouraged to leave home on their own, leaving the police to dismiss them as runaways. “We are out there trying to bring her home,” Rues said. Tania Rues, a spokesperson for the Miramar Police Department, said detectives have scoured several neighborhoods in search of her. Like many missing teenagers, Victoria has left home before, but never for more than a day, her father said. “I’m not getting any sleep, because I’m wondering: ‘Did somebody hurt her?’ ” he said. A security guard thought he saw her in an empty apartment building in North Miami, about 13 miles from her home in Miramar, and so Gonzalez has focused his search there. Her family learned that she had been communicating with strangers on adult dating apps under the name “Hennessy.” Her family has received hard-to-trace messages on Instagram that say she was being forced into prostitution in Miami Beach. Gonzalez’s daughter, a biracial Latina, was last seen at school two weeks ago. “The news stations publicize what is more important in terms of ratings. They also say they often work months on a case in ways that are invisible to families.īut visibility is what many families are seeking most. The police say that they take every missing-persons report seriously, but that a large number of cases involve girls or women who have deliberately disappeared and do not want to be found. More than a third of the women and girls reported missing last year in the United States were Black, and the lack of attention to their cases has prompted some people to create organizations and websites dedicated to sharing posters of every missing woman of color, one by one, until they are found. Without media coverage, and the police resources that usually follow, it often falls to families to search for their loved ones. And most of them share an unwelcome trait: Unlike Petito, who carefully chronicled a road trip with her boyfriend online, few people have ever heard of them, raising uncomfortable questions about whose cases get publicized and investigated and whose are largely ignored. Many are chronic runaways, who often are not priorities for the police. Some of them are presumed dead or trafficked. The nation’s recent fascination with every detail of the case of Gabrielle Petito, who went missing and was later found dead in Wyoming, has raised new questions about the tens of thousands of women and girls - many of them Black, Latina or Indigenous - who are reported missing each year and go unnoticed. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times
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