Chicago Police Department has admitted that there might be an active serial killer on the loose after two decades and more than fifty deaths, after so many years, what are the chances that these crimes can be solved? Potential witnesses have forgotten details, moved away, or even died.
According to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, despite being only 13 percent of the total population, Black Americans account for an average of 34 percent of all missing persons every year. Grassroots efforts ranging from websites like Black and Missing to candlelight vigils, flyers, and social media campaigns on Twitter and Facebook are important tools to generate attention, but they are no match for mainstream news coverage or better efforts by the government. Social media has also made it possible for families who can’t get traditional media attention on their own to potentially go viral and end up with more people looking for their lost loved ones.
But at least there has been some effort by the government to keep track of missing Black people through collecting racially specific data, even if there is minimal follow-up to solve the cases. The categories used to track data largely rely on a Black-white binary approach to the American population and obscure other racial and ethnic identifiers. Only in the past ten years has there been any real effort by the FBI to track the numbers of missing Indigenous women. And while the Canadian government has invested resources in tracking what is happening there, the United States lags far behind despite promises by the government to do better.
A study by the Urban Indian Health Institute showed that of the 5,712 cases of missing Indigenous women reported in 2016, only 116 were logged in the Department of Justice database. Data analysis also shows that some counties had murder rates of Indigenous women that were more than ten times the national average. Unfortunately, the quality of this data is limited by the willingness of individuals to report violence to police and of law enforcement to designate deaths as homicide. A 2014 study in the American Journal of Public Health on causes of death in Indigenous American communities using data collected between 1999 and 2009 found that Indigenous women have a homicide rate triple that of white women.
Similarly, Latinx face a lack of investment in their safety, especially under the auspices of a government led by white supremacist men and enabled by white supremacist women to pretend that they don’t even deserve to seek safety. Buried in the anti-immigrant rhetoric that the GOP is currently espousing to justify building a wall is the sad fact that, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports, many of the women from Central America seeking asylum are fleeing gender violence.
Women and children, especially girls, as well as LGBTQIA people continue to face high levels of gender-based violence in the United States and around the world. Femicide (the murder of women) is a global issue. For example, in El Salvador, ranked number one in the world in female homicide, there were a reported 469 femicides in 2017, which means that on average, more than nine women or girls were killed every week in 2017. Many of the Latinx asylum seekers are women, children, and LGBTQIA people fleeing brutal physical and sexual violence at the hands of gang members and other individuals at home. Unfortunately, they may not find much greater safety in the United States or in Canada. We know that in the United States, an average of three women are killed every day by someone they know, usually a current or former partner. But because of the high number of missing persons, as well as the unsolved murders of marginalized women, girls, and femme-presenting people in the United States, we don’t have a concrete idea of the femicide rate in this country.
We know that of documented murders, 22 percent of the nearly fifteen thousand people killed every year in the United States are women, while only 11 percent of the murders in El Salvador are women. Although Canada’s overall murder rate is lower than that of the United States’, 30 percent of victims in Canada are women. Despite narratives that position other countries as less civilized and more dangerous for women and girls than the West, the reality is that rates of violence are among the worst in the world here.