Tiffany Taylor has been missing for 36 days. Why does no one seem to care?

Tiffany Taylor is a 16-year-old from Queensland.

She went missing 36 days ago. Her mother and sister have been desperate to find her since she disappeared from the accommodation Tiffany shared with her boyfriend. Her older sister said that “my sister was a lovely little girl, a good girl. Very friendly, she’d talk to anybody.”

Last week, Rodney Wayne Williams was charged with Tiffany’s murder.

On Saturday, 40 SES workers and 20 police officers searched bushland for Tiffany’s body. By 3pm the same day, the search had been called off – less than a day after it began.

When we heard about Williams’ arrest last week, there was some sense of surprise – a friendly 16-year-old was missing and we didn’t know about it? She was missing for over a month? Why did they call off that search after less than a day? They were searching near a close and compassionate rural community – surely everyone would leave their homes on a Saturday to find a missing teen?

When Stephanie Scott and Jill Meagher died, our screens were saturated with every detail of their lives and the hunt for their killers. When 17-year-old Masa Vukotic was killed in a park near her Melbourne home, there were scenes of grief on every channel (her story is back in the paper today as Sean Price pleads guilty of her murder).

For these women, there were very public remembrances in parks, spontaneous shrines and street marches. There were front pages of newspapers across the country and special bulletins on the news.

Where are the street marches and public gatherings for Tiffany Taylor? Where is her day of remembrance? Where is her shrine?

Like Stephanie, Jill and Masa, Tiffany is young and pretty – a demographic that normally grabs the headlines – so why didn’t we know she was missing? Why can I only find information about her in short dispatches on the internet and not at all in physical papers today?

But then headlines yesterday revealed the answer.

Police believe that Tiffany was “offering sexual services for money on internet dating sites.”

There it is: the reason that we didn’t hear about this, the reason why she wasn’t on all of our TV screens. Tiffany was doing sex work. And she was living in a hotel in Logan, on Brisbane’s much-maligned south side. Tiffany was poor. She had no fixed address. She was a pregnant teen. But most of all, she had apparently advertised her sexual services online.

It wasn’t just who Tiffany was that kept this story off our radar – it was what she did.

And without missing a beat, we now have headlines with police warning that this is what happens to women online:

That same story draws parallel between Tiffany’s case and a notorious Gold Coast murder from earlier this year where police say that a man answered an ad for sexual services and was allegedly killed by a sex worker and her partner.

The combined effect of these stories is to say that: (a) women who offer services online only have themselves to blame when they are murdered; and (b) sex work and murder go together – and no one should be terribly surprised when murder is the result of a woman advertising her services.

We don’t know much about Tiffany and her life – and to some extent that is surprising given how much we know about Jill Meagher, Stephanie Scott and Alison Baden-Clay.

But the only thing we need to know is this: a 16-year-old is missing. Police presume that she has been murdered. Her family misses her and they are hoping against hope for her return.

Someone probably knows something about her disappearance, but until she is found, her family will not rest. Losing a loved one in this way will likely mean that they will never find peace.

But tragically, her family is going through this alone – without the outpouring of support that we, as a nation, have offered so many other families who have lost their daughter, sister or friend.

We need to remember Tiffany Taylor’s name. She was 16. And like every 16-year-old, she has so much worth, so much potential and so much to offer.

Her life is just as valuable as the life of every other young woman.

For more, try these… 

A man has been charged with murdering 16-year-old Queensland girl Tiffany Taylor.

The life of another women has been claimed by alleged domestic violence.

Lisa Oldfield: “I’ve been a victim of domestic violence and I’m angry.”