Conceptualizing Missingness: A Case Study in Rural Mississippi

Missing persons is an understudied area, especially within forensic anthropology when not associated with cases of mass violence or mass disaster. Affecting more than half a million persons in the United States yearly, missingness has proven to be a significant issue across the country—and globally—with no explicit preventative measures or solutions having been identified. Here we contribute to conceptualizations regarding the incidence of going missing, or missingness, utilizing frameworks of structural violence, necropolitics, and intersectionality. The concept of missingness is then applied to a case study of missing persons from Mississippi, documented in the Mississippi Repository for Missing and Unidentified Persons. Missingness was found to affect demographic groups differently, with marginalized racial and ethnic groups not only disproportionately exposed to the risk of missingness but also suffering from the worst case outcomes after having gone missing. We argue that the socioeconomic, political, and sociocultural limitations structural violence imposes upon marginalized groups may result in missingness. By rigorously theorizing missingness, we hope to draw attention to and improve an understanding of the silent epidemic of missingness, eventually resulting in the identification of specific circumstances correlated to missingness and ultimately improving prevention and recovery efforts.