Protesters grieving Vancouver’s missing women can yell and blame all they want, and it won’t do any good at all. The events that led to the horror began decades ago, and they’re everyone’s fault.

 

Published: The Vancouver Sun, February 16, 2002, Op-ed column

Deborah Jones

 

Introduction: Dozens of women vanished over a 25-year period from Vancouver’s squalid Downtown Eastside, an open drug and sex market in the neighbourhood that is Canada’s most impoverished. At the time this column was written, a police task force was seeking a suspected serial killer; shortly after its publication a pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, a suburb of Vancouver, was arrested. After years of court hearings and continuing investigations, Robert William Pickton will stand trial in the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Jan. 2007, on six charges of first degree murder. Police, still investigating, have found the DNA of dozens of women on the Pickton family property. Further trials are expected. The police investigation and sensational court hearings have resulted in no visible change on the Downtown Eastside, where women sex trade workers still walk dark streets and illegal drug dealers still sell their wares openly.

 

    When I answered my doorbell late that evening, I found a couple of drunk teenagers snogging on the porch. "I'm here for the room to rent?" said the girl, after disentangling herself from the boy and smearing her lipstick by wiping her mouth with her sleeve.

    

    I was very young and very naive, in a new city with one of my first jobs. I'd rented a big house and advertised in the newspaper for a roommate to share the cost. The kid on the porch was the antithesis of the young professional or groomed college student I had in mind.

 

    Ugh, I thought. No, I said.

 

    Maybe I didn't say "No!" with enough force. Maybe the kid was just so desperate she hurled herself into my house the way a shipwreck victim would clamber onto any floating object. Whatever the reason, she woke me in the middle of the next night, banging on the door. She was alone, hauling her belongings in a green garbage bag, face streaked with mascara and tears. "My boyfriend kicked me out. I have nowhere else to go," she said.

 

    I made hot chocolate, found out that the kid had run away from home and that social services was helping her return to school and would pay for a place to live. She said her name was Angel and she was 16. I didn't believe either claim, but gave her a foamy and sleeping bag and said she could stay only one night.

 

    By the time she left six weeks later, I'd found out that Angel was from a rural town, her mom had died when she was little, she hated her dad and her stepmother, she'd started running away at age 11 and she had a horrible relationship with her social worker. I never did nail down her real name (as I said, I was naive).

 

    But even back then, I knew enough to suspend both my belief and my judgment of her. And I knew that neither her social worker nor I - - despite my very busy life, my new career and my best intentions not to get involved, I found myself playing the role of horribly inadequate big sister -- could get this screwed-up kid's life back on track.

 

    Angel's catastrophic derailment had happened too long ago, in early childhood. Maybe, helped earlier, her life could have been salvaged. But by the time adolescence hit, her future was entirely in her hands; others could merely offer inadequate safety nets.

 

    I wasn't surprised when Angel dropped out of school, convinced by a friend -- a girl who looked, walked and sounded like a hooker -- to move to a bigger city.

 

    For the next few months, she called me collect from cities throughout Western Canada, apparently to just talk or maybe hear someone tell her she had a place to return to. Whether she was a prostitute, she never said, and I never asked. Then she vanished. That was more than two decades ago, but she still comes to mind every so often.

 

    On Thursday, as a reporter watching several hundred people march through the Downtown Eastside in a protest against violence against women, I found myself scanning the faces of the women, wondering if one of them could be Angel, or even her daughter.

 

    I wondered if Angel had ever met one of the 50 women who have vanished since 1983 and are feared to have been victims of a murderer. Horribly, I wondered if when Angel vanished she had suffered a fate like theirs.

 

    As the speakers, backed into the dark entrance of the Main Street police station, railed against the police, the government and any and all authorities who allowed violence, discrimination and poverty to take place in the Downtown Eastside, I found my mind remembering Angel arriving on my doorstep.

 

    I thought that the protesters could yell all they wanted, and it wouldn't do any good at all.

 

    No one authority, from police to government, could have prevented the train wreck of Angel's life; no one authority can prevent the steady supply of suffering souls who arrive in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside to sink into prostitution, drugs and violence.

 

    In Angel's case, with the hindsight of experience, I am dead certain that more of us -- from social workers to the ordinary people whom she met along the way, including me -- could have erected much better safety nets, so that when she started slipping through the cracks she need not have fallen far.

 

    But like most people I've met who are down and out, Angel's troubles began in early childhood, triggered by misfortune married to malicious neglect, abuse or ignorance.

 

    On Thursday, as revellers celebrated Chinese New Year's in Chinatown a stone's throw to the south, and lovers shopped for Valentine's presents in the upscale boutiques to the west, protesters in the Downtown Eastside cried "shame" on the police for not stopping violence, including by a possible predator now feared to be a serial killer.

 

    They'd more usefully cry "shame" at all of us who fail to look after our youngsters, our families, our neighbours, so that none need end up in places like the Downtown Eastside.