I agree. You know what's bullshit? This is on the front page but every time I said this same damn thing about Jill Meagher, everyone jumped on me like I was the one that murdered her. (If you lived in Australia it was all you'd hear about every day for the last half of last month. It was probably the top news story since the Olympics.)

People were marching in the streets, it was on the front page every newspaper, on every website, /r/australia was covered in it from top to bottom. I couldn't leave my bedroom without someone bringing it up - my parents, my colleagues, facebook posts, Twitter trends... it was EVERYwhere.

You know what happened? You know what massive story stopped the presses more than just about anything else in the past year? Some girl got raped and murdered, then the guy turned himself in. That's it. That's the whole entire story. But somehow every 'news'paper and commercial TV station in the country managed to squeeze two weeks worth of front page news out of this horseshit.

This is her. I think you can guess why everybody cared. Somehow almost everybody in the country convinced themselves this was a truly unique story and not a case of missing white woman syndrome - even before her body turned up, before we knew she was raped or even dead.

I think it sucks too, and I want the shitbag to rot in jail as much as the next guy. Her and her family have gone through an unimaginable amount of suffering at the hands of some horny, psycho scumbag who was too cheap to shell out for a hooker. But there are seven billion people in the world. Why am I expected to pretend to care about one that I've never met just to make it to work without being looked at like I eat babies? Nobody gives a shit about the other thousands of people a year that go missing, or get raped, or killed. Nobody gives a fuck when a homeless 50 year old man disappears, or a black kid from a shitty suburb. Nobody posted to facebook when 100 people in Libya got blown up on the same day Jill was plastered all over the news (yes, this actually happened).

What were they protesting? What are they getting up in arms about?? The authorities dedicated a huge, probably disproportionate amount of resources to finding her. The guy even fucking caved in and confessed. Were they expecting rapists everywhere to suddenly change their mind? "Oh wow, I didn't realise abducting and raping girls was wrong, good thing I saw that sign this morning. Guess I'll take up knitting instead."

I swear this shit is up there with 'making everything pink to magically fix breast cancer' as far as doing sweet fuck all goes.

So I say in /r/australia and /r/melbourne - in context, mostly when it had already been brought up - that this is hugely disproportionate and that nobody would care if this was a 40 year old Aboriginal man. Not to her family, not to her friends, but I was saying this to people who had never heard of her before she went missing. And were acting like it was the end of the world. And I get called sexist (wut?), a pig, a sleazebag, a cunt, a piece of shit, an asshole... the list goes on. People would actually sit there vehemently defending this ridiculous parade of faux-empathy as if we do this for every missing person. It's bullshit.

I'm not saying we shouldn't shame those convicted of shit like this, or try to do something about it - but when was the last time you heard of a fat, acne-ridden foreign boy disappearing?

Tl;dr: Fuck you Australia.