More than sixty women have gone missing from Vancouver’s East Side the majority since the mid 1980’s. Most were sex workers – many of them Aboriginal women.
This week the trial for Robert William Pickton began. Charged with killing six of those women, Pickton has pleaded not guilty to six counts of murder. This is only the beginning of legal proceedings against Pickton. He is apparently going to be tried for another twenty murders.
Some people speculate that the murders were not the work of one person; they claim there must have been others. It has even been rumoured that a crime ring was involved. I doubt we will ever get the whole story.
Regardless, what has happened is a microcosm of how sex workers are viewed and treated by society.
People will lose their appetites over dinner when they hear how body parts of some the women were found in Pickton’s freezer. Many will have a hard time sleeping when they see the tears of the victims’ families and loved ones.
Yet all too often, society treats sex workers as subhuman.
In the media we read how disgusting and appalling it is to be one of those girls. While walking down the street, people yell obscenities at those girls. At NIMBY meetings people quake with fury because those girls are in their neighbourhoods; they insist that the police arrest them because they are scared their property values will go down.
When the police come, too many times they mistreat those girls. They harass them, threaten them, rape them, and beat them. So when more than 60 go missing, it is no big deal.
After all, those girls are a symbol of a corrupt and wayward society.
Those girls are drug addicts. Those girls spread diseases. Those girls are WHORES.
I hope that this wakes Canadians up. I want my fellow Canadians to go beyond saying “those poor girls didn’t deserve that.” I want them to go beyond admitting that sex workers are human.
I want them to acknowledge that sex workers live in a climate that fosters hatred against us. I want them to acknowledge that the laws we have in place right now are de facto death sentences.
I want people to ACT on those acknowledgments and change. It’s the only way can avoid tragedies like this from happening again.
Laurel Ronan
SPOC