When Jill Meagher went missing the media, and the people were stirred into action. But when sex worker Tracy Connelly was murdered, the news barely made the papers. What makes one woman worth more than another, asks Lauren Rosewarne.

A phone call I received from a journalist will long be my takeaway from the Jill Meagher story. A woman around my age, she asked me whether my sense of safety has been disrupted.

Initially she was hostile at my answer, apparently salivating for a frightened quote from someone with "Dr" in front of her name. The exchange got heated. And then she started crying. Her sense of safety, apparently, had been shattered.

I'd be interested to know whether she was affected as deeply by the murder of Tracy Connelly.

I had many concerns with the Jill Meagher coverage, much centred on feeding the fear that that journalist had - the fear that I'm apparently supposed to harbour - about marauding men and my need to arm myself against them.

My central irritation however, was how the media plays favourites. About how some victims are worth time, attention, vigils and tears and others are relegated to straight, just-the-facts-ma'am reporting at the back of the paper.

That youth, those looks, that respectable office employment and inner-cityness makes a sympathetic victim. That those murdered outside of this archetype don't.

Without a question, reporting the horrendous Jill Meagher story was the right thing. Of course. But in that classic opportunity cost argument, the minute can only be spent once, the dollar only once, and time and words devoted to one story inevitably come at the sacrifice of others.

And for stories that can't be packaged well, stories that don't have the same heart-string-tugging appeal and stories that involve people our culture has decided are disposable apparently don't make good copy.

Like clockwork, every few months there will be a story about a department store retailing bras for children. Or G-strings for children. Or something equally predictable and boring. And inevitably parenting groups will condemn the "whore wear"; that they don't want their daughters "looking like strippers". Subtle, but indicative of the fascinating and heinously revolting pastime of demonising sex workers.

Pointing to sex workers as blights on our landscape - as the most abhorrent thing a girl could ever be mistaken for - sketches the backdrop for how the murder of a woman who also happened to be a sex worker will be reported.

And it's the "less sympathetic victim" aspect that is actually summoning my tears this time.

Just as every story on Jill Meagher repeated the narrative of her working at the ABC/living in inner-city Melbourne/going about her normal end-of-week social routine, every story about Tracy Connelly mentioned that she was a sex worker. And in two words, encapsulated is the reason her name won't become household. Won't prompt journalists to phone me in tears seeking comment. Won't have us remembering where we were when her body was discovered.

In every media story - not just the bad ones - those involving people apparently "like us" are prioritised. For that journalist, for the thousands of people who attended vigils, Jill Meagher was like us: it could have been me.

But what made Jill more like us than Tracy Connelly?

What made Tracy Connelly more of a sex worker than a woman?

What makes sex workers less valuable than office workers?

What makes one woman worth more than another?

Crime-themed television shows present the murdered sex worker trope as a truism: apparently this is their expected fate. And lots of people swallow this and make assumptions about sex work as a dangerous profession, about the sex worker asking, courting disaster, about their throwawayness.

No woman asks to be murdered. That's a complete sentence. That we dare ask questions of what the victim was doing or wearing or trading or what she looked like is the filthiest indictment on us.

Dr Lauren Rosewarne is a senior lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. View her full profile here.

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