Downtown Eastside Women

Let's start with this. Since that's where most of my issues lie.

The 70 women who have disappeared are becoming well known, especially those whom Pickton is accused of killing. We're seeing them for the first time. Believe it or not, and no matter what the media and the missing people web site says, most of us are encountering these women for the first time. And in a way that's good. We get to know that they were more than drug addicts, more than prostitutes, more than the blurred faces we see on downtown streets everywhere.

We see that they are, or were, daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, cousins and friends. We see that they had fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, cousins and friends.

But what about the blurred faces you see and I see every time I walk downtown? We hold the 70 up because they are gone. Now they are no longer a presence on the street to shame us, to bother us, to make us squirm, to buy their services from, we can see them, at least dimly, for the rounded human beings they were, and that's good. And we should see them that way, and honour them in their absence for who they were.

But what about the blurred faces we see whenever we walk downtown? What about them? How many of them will have to disappear before we see them as rounded human beings - broken and hurting, like we are? And yes, we are broken. The fact that there are women and men still walking the streets, who will sell their bodies and spirits for a packet of oblivion means that our society is broken. And our society is made up of individuals. That's us. If society is broken, then the compenent parts are, and that means that you and I are broken, too.

How is reading and learning about the 70 going to help or change anything for their colleagues? I'm not calling for more social activism here, I'm not saying we should all go out and adopt a hooker - there's lots of that there now, and it hasn't done a whole lot of good. I'm not looking for answers, I'm just asking questions - and I'm not sure there are any answers. But my fear is that this will be another flash in the pan - we'll talk about them, speculate, sermonize, capitalize on them, and while we'll maybe remember some of them in 25 or 30 years, there will still be the blurry faces that we don't look at, or stare at, or whom we make a deal with. And so how will all this have helped, or changed things?