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On Thursday the BBC ran this headline on their news website: “Sarah Everard: How a woman’s death sparked a nation’s soul-searching.”

From the moment her body was found in Kent, the media and social media have been full of the tragic kidnapping and murder of Sarah Everard. The BBC News Channel interrupted interviews and

reports on other stories for updates from New Scotland Yard. The Duchess of Cambridge was photographed paying her respects to the young woman on Clapham Common. 

This murder seemed to strike a chord with women of all ages, but perhaps especially younger women in their 20s and 30s. “We were all Sarah,” said one woman interviewed on the BBC. Many wrote

of being fearful or angry and spoke of this murder as a turning-point in the way they think of violence against women. And no one doubted that we need such a turning-point, to think

differently about the causes of such violence and how best to deal with it. Sarah Everard’s murder has predictably been compared with George Floyd’s, a death which caught the public

imagination and became a symbol for a larger movement.

This month there have also been news reports about the brutal murders of two other young women. In February a young woman, Bennylyn Burke (pictured), and her two children disappeared from

their home in Gloucestershire. Bennylyn was 25. She was of Asian origin. On 1 March, Andrew Innes, a 50-year-old man, was charged with Bennylyn’s murder and that of her two-year-old daughter

at his house in Dundee. Her other child was found alive.

On 10 March a 31-year-old man, Chun Xu, was charged with the murder of Wenjing Lin, aged 16, at her family’s Chinese takeaway in South Wales. 

Both these stories of the murders of young women were reported by local papers, national papers and by TV news, though the coverage was not extensive. However, it didn’t remotely compare

with the coverage of Sarah Everard. No one spoke of these other crimes as sparking a nation’s soul-searching. They didn’t make any of the front pages. No one said, “We are all Bennylyn.” Or,

“We are all Wenjing.”

Why not? What’s the difference? These were all violent murders of young women by men. It’s true that a policeman has been charged with Sarah Everard’s murder and that is very unusual. It’s

also true that she was apparently kidnapped in London, walking home, not murdered in Dundee or a small town in south Wales. A lot of women on social media identified with Sarah Everard:

university educated, walking alone one evening, there was nothing about her appearance that was at all unusual, she could have been anyone. Perhaps this is why so many have told their own

moving stories of sexual assault and violence at the hands of male strangers, friends and acquaintances.

There is one other key difference between Sarah and Bennylyn or Wenjing. Sarah was white. Did this make it easier for so many white, mainly middle-class women on news programmes, writing for

newspapers or tweeting on social media, to identify with her — as opposed to two young Asian women killed in Scotland or Wales? On the 7pm news on the BBC News Channel on Saturday there was

a white woman presenter introducing a report by a white woman reporter and everyone interviewed during the item was a white woman. 

This all happened in the wake of that interview with the Sussexes by Oprah Winfrey, in which Meghan famously alleged that a racist remark had been made to her by someone in the Palace,

perhaps even in the Royal Family, and that she had been attacked by Britain’s racist media, especially the tabloid press. This also sparked a fevered national debate. Is the monarchy racist?

a reporter asked Prince William. Numerous Black academics, lawyers and journalists said this was a savage indictment of racist Britain, which had still not dealt with its colonial past.

This, too, “sparked a nation’s soul-searching” and felt like a turning-point.    

And yet I haven’t seen an article or TV discussion which connected the relative silence about the murders of two Asian women with the debate about racism in Britain and its media. It was as

if these two debates had nothing to do with each other. 

Often racism is not about what has been said or done to someone. It is also about absences, someone who doesn’t make the headlines as much as someone who does.  Why weren’t newspaper and

programme editors as interested in these other murders as in the killing of Sarah Everard? 

During the long years that have followed the disappearance of Madeleine McCann some speculated why her disappearance so fascinated the media compared to all the other children who disappear.

Many said it was simple. She was white, pretty, blonde. Many of the others were children of colour. The former head of Portugal’s bar association, José Miguel Júdice, said the emotional

response was because the little girl “is English, white, and the daughter of doctors.” Raymond Snoddy wrote in Marketing: “To what extent has all this coverage been kept afloat for so long

because the child is white and photogenic, and has articulate, resourceful parents?” 

“Someone is reported missing every 90 seconds in Britain – this equates to 180,000 people per year – and yet, we only hear about a small fraction of them. Whose story is told might seem like

luck of the draw, but in reality there are a lot of factors that determine which disappearances are considered newsworthy, and which are not. Unfortunately, I believe race is one of them…

Think of the faces of missing women that make the front pages – they are often white with fair hair.”

I wonder what women of colour think of these different kinds of coverage. It’s hard to know, because white newspaper and programme editors aren’t asking their reporters to find out. 

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