In BC we are in the midst of a gruesome murder trial.
A trial about a even more gruesome and horrific murder spree 'allegedly' committed by a Robert 'Willie' Pickton.
Pickton is on trial for 6 of 26 murders of women he apparently invited or lured to his pig farm. Most of these women had been on a missing women's list for many many years. Most of these women were either homeless, prostitutes, drug addicts or all of the above.
I personally have no interest in hearing every tidbit and detail about what is heard in court. I can only imagine and that is fine with me. All I hope is that the trail does NOT get bolixed up and some sort of justice is met.
What has gotten my interest, or curiosity or whatever you want to call it is the visions and words of the families of these women. A lot of them have traveled far and made many sacrifices to attend the trial They want answers. They want closure.
As would all families of victims of murder.
And they all seem to be loving and kind people.
So what happened? Why were these women on the street? What drove them all away to end up 'whereabouts' unknown by their own friends and family?
Where were these loving people for all these years?
I find it all very very sad.
The 'Downtown Eastside' is a hellhole like no other. Not in our so-called Western civilization.
This is where the forgotten congregate. You cannot sink any further than this.
Drugs are used openly in the streets. The alleys are used as shoot up corners and toilets. People lay drunk where they fell and others step over and around them.
It is a nightmare and this is where the majority of these women who were killed had been existing.
Why Vancouver allows this place to exist is beyond me. Though I have no answers on how to deal with it. Not now.
It has been like this for a very long time. It is Dickensian in it's despair.
You can imagine the Olympic committee are having fits about it all. Let the world see this version of our so-called world class city. Let the world see what we do with the mentally ill and the drug addicted and the generally down trodden and out of luck people.
Where are the resources? Where is the help?
Some of Pickton's victims had children!
I have no answers. Only questions. I have no clever summation for this post. Thought I can see how creatures like Pickton no doubt viewed these women as less than human and therefore his actions were 'easier' for him and his kind, because really we allowed them to exist in inhuman conditions and live inhuman lives and all the civic types worry about is how to hide them from the world.
I hope that the attention and media frenzy around the trial brings about one thing....that people start asking the right people the right questions about what is to be done about this place and the poor people eking out a living there.
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2 comments:
I wish it would get people asking the right questions but I doubt it will. Most people prefer to ignore that part of reality.
It's sad that the one's who are most often the victims are the one's that need our compassion the most.
Unfortunately the industries that exploit these women is so pervasive in the U.S., porn being the one that bugs me the most. I read somewhere that the vast majority of women in the industry were abused as children, which is what I'd expect. It just bothers me to no end that these women end up in an industry that continues to abuse them. Sure, you could argue that they do it voluntarily, and that's the same mindset that calls prostitution a "victimless crime." But somehow we've decided our daughters are expendable and we turn a blind eye to what is so obviously the result of abuse.
I'm not saying that these families are not nice people, often abuse comes at the hand of a "family friend." But one has to wonder how these girls ended up where they did. I'm sure they cried out for help at some point. It's sad someone didn't listen.
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