I have been sitting with a growing discomfort for weeks now, trying to understand why certain stories enter the national bloodstream immediately while others seem to remain trapped within the communities already carrying the pain of them. What unsettled me first was not only the deaths themselves, but the silence surrounding them. I kept asking myself a simple question: why did I not know? Why had I not heard about these women until another Black woman asked me directly what I thought about what was happening?
That question matters.
Because I am someone who reads widely. I follow current affairs. I pay attention to issues around race, gender, institutions, policing, violence, and inequality. Yet I did not hear about several Black women who had gone missing and later been found in bodies of water across the UK. I did not hear sustained discussion. I did not see rolling news coverage. I did not see national panic. I did not see the country stop and ask what was happening.
Instead, I learned about these cases through Black community networks, Black-led publications, social media discussions among Black women, and independent reporting platforms such as Black Current News and The Voice. These were the spaces where concern was circulating. These were the spaces where people were asking questions. These were the spaces where Black women were trying to make sense of something that felt deeply unsettling.
Even my husband, who is white, was shocked when I told him what Black women had been discussing quietly among ourselves. He had not heard about many of these cases. Not because he was dismissive or uncaring, but because these stories had simply not entered the mainstream information channels in the way that other tragedies often do. That distinction stayed with me because it revealed something uncomfortable about how public attention functions in this country.
Some tragedies become national conversations almost immediately. They dominate headlines. They generate emotional language from politicians and commentators. Public safety concerns are raised urgently. The public is asked to remain vigilant. Entire symbolic frameworks of mourning emerge rapidly around them. Yet other deaths seem to circulate almost entirely through racialised community networks, carried by those who already know what it feels like to exist with a diminished expectation of institutional protection.
This is not a conspiracy theory. Nor am I claiming that unrelated deaths are definitively connected when authorities have repeatedly stated there is currently no evidence of third-party involvement in several of these cases. I am also not claiming that every case involving Black women found in water has the same explanation or circumstances. What I am questioning is something broader and, in many ways, more difficult to confront: why does concern itself appear so unevenly distributed?
Why does the disappearance or death of Black women so often feel met with quieter public urgency?
Why do so many Black families and Black women feel they must raise awareness themselves because they do not trust that wider institutions will do so with sufficient seriousness?
Why are Black women repeatedly left feeling that our vulnerability is not publicly legible unless we force people to look at it?
The issue is not simply whether every case has an explanation. Of course many deaths do. The issue is whether Black women receive the same level of visible concern, investigative transparency, media attention, safeguarding urgency, and collective empathy that other groups appear to receive automatically. What many Black women are reacting to is not only individual cases, but a cumulative pattern of feeling structurally unprotected.
That feeling does not emerge from nowhere.
For me personally, these conversations intersect painfully with my own experiences with institutions, particularly policing. During one of the most vulnerable periods of my life, during a severe period of psychological distress and what authorities interpreted as a mental health crisis, I experienced treatment from the police that left me feeling less like a human being in need of care and more like a problem to be contained. I was handled in ways that I still struggle to process fully. When I later tried to raise concerns about how I had been treated, I did not feel genuinely listened to. My complaint was concluded without meaningful engagement with me. There was no serious attempt to sit with me, hear my experience properly, or examine why I felt harmed. The matter simply appeared administratively resolved.
That experience fundamentally altered my understanding of institutional trust.
Trust is not built through slogans about equality or diversity. It is built through whether people feel heard, protected, and treated with dignity when they are most vulnerable. And once that trust is damaged, every new case involving institutional indifference or muted concern resonates differently.
This is part of why conversations about Black women’s safety cannot be dismissed simply as paranoia, emotional overreaction, or “playing the race card.” Black women’s mistrust of institutions is historically produced. It has been shaped through repeated encounters with disbelief, neglect, stereotyping, minimisation, and unequal protection. Black women are frequently expected to survive extraordinary forms of hardship quietly. We are often framed as resilient enough to endure suffering, but not fragile enough to trigger collective urgency.
That contradiction matters.
The concern many Black women are expressing right now is not merely about criminality. It is also about visibility. About recognisability. About who becomes publicly grievable. About whose disappearance interrupts the national imagination enough to demand sustained attention and whose suffering remains largely contained within the communities already carrying the burden of it.
What disturbed me deeply about the recent discussions surrounding Black women found in bodies of water was the sense that many people outside Black communities did not even know these women existed. Their names were not circulating widely. Their stories were not dominating national discussion. Yet within Black spaces, there was fear, concern, confusion, grief, and growing distrust.
That split is politically significant.
It suggests the existence of two public conversations happening simultaneously: one inside Black communities, where people are anxiously exchanging information, warnings, and concerns among themselves, and another dominant national conversation where these stories remain relatively marginal.
And that gap has consequences.
When communities repeatedly feel that they must create their own infrastructures of awareness because mainstream systems do not reflect their fears back to them with equal urgency, distrust deepens further. People begin to feel that if something happens to them, they too may disappear quietly from public concern.
This is why the issue of Black women’s safety cannot be reduced to internet speculation or emotional exaggeration. Even where investigations conclude that there is no evidence of criminal involvement, the wider social question remains: why do so many Black women feel unsafe, unheard, and insufficiently protected?
That question deserves serious attention.
It also deserves care and responsibility. Fear alone cannot sustain productive public conversation. It is important not to drift into unsupported conclusions or claims that cannot be evidenced. The point is not to spread panic. The point is to ask why Black women repeatedly feel that their safety is treated as secondary until tragedy occurs.
And perhaps this is where the conversation needs to move next: toward community care, awareness, and practical protection rather than silence. If Black women feel structurally underprotected, then we must also discuss what collective safeguarding looks like. We need conversations about vulnerability, check-ins, travelling safely, mental health support, community accountability, escalation when someone goes missing, and ensuring concerns are taken seriously early rather than retrospectively.
But we also need honesty.
Because the truth is that many Black women no longer experience institutions as unquestionably protective spaces. For some, trust has fractured slowly through repeated encounters with dismissal. For others, it has fractured suddenly through direct experiences of harm, disbelief, or indifference. Either way, the result is the same: a growing feeling that Black women must often rely on one another to survive systems that do not consistently demonstrate equal urgency toward our suffering.
And perhaps that is the most painful part of all.
Not only the fear itself, but the feeling that if we do not speak for ourselves, raise awareness ourselves, circulate names ourselves, and protect each other ourselves, many people would simply never know these women existed at all.
