By Amy Juschka
Photo by Jay Black
While February 14 is a day of romance for most people, it is a day of remembrance and mourning in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Every Valentine’s Day for the past 18 years, men and women have gathered at the corner of Main and Hastings streets for the Women’s Memorial March.
The march, which began after a woman was found brutally murdered on Powell Street in 1992, is a chance for Downtown Eastside residents, and the rest of the city, to honour and remember the lives of Vancouver’s murdered and missing women.
More than 60 women from the Downtown Eastside—many of them survival sex workers—are known to have gone missing or been murdered in the last two decades. Though the 2002 arrest of serial killer Robert (Willie)
Pickton provided some answers, the Vancouver Police Department lists 39 women as still missing from the area.
Downtown Eastside resident Samantha Sam is a young aboriginal woman who, until six months ago, was heavily street-entrenched. Since getting clean, Sam has found support at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, a neighbourhood drop-in centre that provides frontline services to over 300 women every day. It is here that Sam became involved with the memorial march, which she now helps organize in the name of the loved ones she’s lost to violence.
“My cousin was murdered in her [Single Room Occupancy] hotel about 12 years ago,” says Sam. “They said it was her boyfriend who did it. And my aunt was murdered in Oppenheimer Park—it’s now a cold case file. And I have a couple friends that were found on Pickton’s farm.”
The slow response
It was the early 1980s when neighbourhood residents began to piece together a troubling picture: Women were disappearing from the Downtown Eastside.
Though neighbourhood residents, along with friends and family members of the missing women, called for police action, efforts were slow and the response was seemingly indifferent.
The disappearances went largely unremarked in mainstream media, and police and city officials denied that there was any pattern to the disappearances. Activists charged that police and politicians viewed these women, so many of them pushed by poverty into drug use and survival sex work, as having made high-risk “lifestyle choices” and were suffering the consequences.
It was only in 1998 that the police began their official search. By then, dozens of women had been listed as missing from the neighbourhood—some dating as far back as the early 1970s. As the search gained momentum in the first years of the new millennium, more than 60 women had been listed as missing, 16 of whom were aboriginal.
Finally, in February 2002, Pickton, a Port Coquitlam pig farmer, was arrested and eventually charged with the murders of 26 of the missing women. The trial, which began in January 2006, dealt with the deaths of just six of the women—Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Marnie Frey, Brenda Wolfe and Georgina Papin.
In December 2007, Pickton was convicted of second-degree murder on all six counts and sentenced to life in prison.
Little has changed
Extreme poverty and marginalization continue to expose women in the Downtown Eastside to violence while denying them adequate protection by police. In a society that has criminalized and stigmatized sex work and those that depend on it for survival, sex trade workers who have been victimized tend not to seek justice because they know they will not get it.
While Pickton’s high-profile trial resulted in international media attention and pushed governments to make some improvements in the Downtown Eastside, women are still going missing from the area and a number of murders—like the case of Lisa Arlene Francis, a Downtown Eastside sex worker whose body was found in the Fraser River last July—remain unsolved.
“There are still women that are being murdered in the community,” says Marlene George, who sits on the march’s organizing committee. “We must continue to raise awareness because... this is not acceptable.”
George first became involved with the memorial march in 1997, while working at the Women’s Centre. She personally knew two of the women from the missing women’s list—Abotsway and Dawn Crey, an aboriginal woman whose DNA was found on the Pickton farm.
“Both of the women used to come into the centre for services, and Sereena was involved with the memorial march before going missing,” says George.
The Valentine’s Day march mourns the individual lives lost and calls attention to the collective injustices that continue to pervade the lives of marginalized women in the Downtown Eastside. It is an act of love and remembrance.
“[The march] is important because that murdered woman probably thought that she was nothing,” says Sam. “But really, a lot of people out there cared about her.”
Despite concerns over Olympic-related traffic, the 19th Annual Memorial March for Murdered and Missing Women will take place on February 14, starting at the corner of Main and Hastings streets at 12 p.m.
