For many years, women were going missing from Canada's poorest neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, but because most were marginalized citizens, politicians and police were mostly indifferent to the growing numbers of missing. There were rumours and strong indications that a serial killer was at work, and appeals by advocacy groups to look into those claims, yet those concerns were constantly dismissed by the policing 'experts' who knew better. Sloppy police work and infighting between police departments also contributed to the failure to catch a serial killer, whose killing spree could have been ended sooner if the police did their job properly. In 2002, Robert Picton was finally arrested and charged with murder, though he could have easily been caught sooner. In December 2007, serial killer Robert Picton was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of six women, though there is evidence that he killed many more women than that.
a) inquire into and make findings of fact respecting the conduct of the investigations conducted between January 23, 1997 and February 5, 2002, by police forces in British Columbia respecting women reported missing from the Downtown Eastside of the city of Vancouver
From the beginning:
https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/38-1/SSLR/meeting-18/evidence
Starting with my testimony:
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Canada’s First Shelter for Sex Workers Provides a ‘Sanctuary’
Jen St. Denis,
In December 2020, Christine was living in a single-room occupancy hotel in the Downtown Eastside with a partner who had severe mental illness and had become abusive.
Their tiny room felt like a “hole in the wall,” and the building — a privately-owned and operated SRO on East Hastings Street — was filthy and dangerous, she said.
“I just had to get out of there,” she said. “I came to a point where I could not stand it any longer.”
Christine is one of 23 women who’ve been able to find refuge at a new shelter that opened in the fall of 2020 in the Downtown Eastside. It’s operated by WISH, an organization that supports sex workers in Vancouver. (The Tyee agreed not to use Christine’s real name because of safety concerns.)
The shelter is unique in Canada: the only other shelter in the country that caters to sex workers is located in a suburb of Montreal, and it’s for women who are leaving sex work.
Christine said she was used to coming to a drop-in space at WISH, and when the shelter opened in November she considered moving in right away. But it would still be a couple of months before she made the leap to get out the abusive relationship she was in at the SRO.
“I’m not threatened here — I was in a threatening situation, I didn’t feel safe,” Christine said.
“I was being robbed and humiliated, all kinds of terrible things. Here I’ve found some calm and peace that I can regroup, and try to take a breath and start over again.”
Christine’s number one goal is to find better housing, because she doesn’t want to live in an SRO hotel anymore. It’s a search that could take a long time, but Christine says living in the WISH shelter means she doesn’t feel rushed to accept unsafe housing.
To underline how hard it is to find affordable housing in Vancouver, Mebrat Beyene, the executive director of WISH, said just three shelter residents have been connected with permanent housing during the six months the shelter has been operating.
Beyene said the shelter has been at capacity since it opened, and women are turned away every day. Women also use the organization’s 24-hour drop-in space to sleep, and the demand for a safe space is so great that some women also use an outdoor area that was created near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as a safe refuge.
The shelter welcomes all self-identified women, including trans women, and is open 24-7. The shelter is located in a building owned by the City of Vancouver, and beds are located in cubicle-like spaces, with lockers for storage, accessible washrooms and showers, and a laundry room that residents can use.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the risks for street-based sex workers have increased:
work dried up, and women saw their incomes drop and they were less able
to refuse unsafe work. Beyene said WISH staff are hearing of an
increase in violence that women are experiencing while they’re working
in the Downtown Eastside, and reports of “bad dates” that sex workers
make to organizations like WISH are also up.
For many of the women, living in the shelter means they can have the option of turning down unsafe work or negotiating a fair price, Beyene said.
For the long term, WISH wants to build a larger, purpose-built shelter for sex workers and is in talks with BC Housing and other partners.* “The space that we’re in right now, that literally is the maximum number of beds we can safely put in,” Beyene said.
Before meeting with The Tyee, Christine said she asked the other women living in the shelter what they would like to say: what has the shelter meant to you?
“And they’ve all said the same thing: It means everything, because without it we’d be on the street or in those rooms or somewhere abusive or whatever,” she said.
“It’s a sanctuary, and of course it means everything to be in a safe, clean nice place where you can rest your head.”
*Story updated on May 18 at 9:45 a.m. to correct that WISH is in talks with BC Housing, not the City of Vancouver.
"Women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside warn of escalation in attacks, kidnappings, forced druggings"
by Michelle Ghoussoub, CBC News · September 21, 2022
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/dtes-womens-safety-warnings-1.6587968
Women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside are warning of escalating levels of violence in the neighbourhood and reporting more frequent, increasingly brutal instances of kidnappings, forced confinements, rapes and robberies, according to front-line workers.
Mebrat Beyene, the executive director of WISH Drop-In Centre Society, said she and others with first-hand knowledge of the neighbourhood are sounding the alarm about "an escalation in violence and predatory behaviour."
"Sex workers are telling us that it's worse than they've ever seen on the street," she said, speaking from the WISH offices on Alexander Street.
"And that's saying a lot for the Downtown Eastside that has suffered a predatory serial murderer who operated almost with impunity in this neighbourhood," she added, referring to Robert Pickton, who is serving life in prison for the murders of six women from the area.
Beyene and others who work in violence prevention say a slew of violent attacks, along with the suspicious deaths of four young Indigenous women, have the community on edge.
They say a collapse in support services during the pandemic, combined with climbing housing costs, are pushing Canada's poorest neighbourhood to a point never seen before — with vulnerable women and girls bearing the brunt of the resulting violence.
"People will come to neighbourhoods like the Downtown Eastside to play out some of the worst violence, possibly because they know they can get away with it," said Beyene.
"It is incredibly scary."
WISH, which operates a 23-bed emergency shelter and runs a slew of support programs, is one of several organizations in the area offering "bad-date reporting," which allows sex workers to warn others of experiences they've had with men.
The findings are compiled by the centre in a "red light report" that removes the women's identifying details and is distributed among sex workers and front-line organizations. Beyene said the report from August painted a dark picture of a worsening situation.
"The [report] speaks to a level of violence that is ongoing and mostly unreported or underreported. It's certainly stories that rarely ever make it into the media," said Beyene.
"What's alarming is how many are quite violent — sometimes they include women being drugged, and detained for hours, sometimes days."
Battered Women's Support Services executive director Angela Marie MacDougall, who also reviews the red light reports, said the violence has been escalating in intensity since the start of the pandemic, but compounded over the summer of 2022.
"The assaults, more brutal. The sexual assaults, more brutal. The confinement over days that women tell us about is horrifying," she said.
"Women are dealing with serious physical injuries as a result of these assaults that then require the kind of medical care that often isn't available."
MacDougall said many women don't report their assaults for fear of retribution, while others don't feel comfortable talking to police. Others say they don't want to be re-traumatized by reporting a crime to a system they feel won't support them.
Still, the increase is captured in data provided by the Vancouver Police Department (VPD), which recorded 10 forcible confinements with female victims in the Downtown Eastside during the first eight months of 2022, compared to five over the same period last year.
The data shows there were 49 sexual assaults against women in the Downtown Eastside in the first eight months of 2022, compared to 34 during the first eight months of 2021. The data did not include any reported instances of kidnappings involving women in the neighbourhood.
The VPD said it could not provide reliable data on what percentage of cases involve sex workers because a person's profession is not always disclosed during the course of an investigation.
4 bodies recently found
Another disturbing trend has residents further on edge.
Since May, the bodies of three young Indigenous women and one Indigenous girl, all with some connection to the Downtown Eastside, have been found in the neighbourhood or in unlikely parts of Metro Vancouver.
On May 2, 20-year-old Tatyanna Harrison's body was found on a 40-foot yacht in a dry dock in Richmond. Harrison, who had been living in the Downtown Eastside, wasn't identified until August.
On May 6, 24-year-old Chelsea Poorman's remains were identified after being found in a Shaughnessy mansion following months of desperate searching by her family.
On May 1, 14-year-old Noelle O'Soup's body was found in a single-room occupancy hotel (SRO) on Heatley Avenue alongside the remains of another woman.
And on July 30, 24-year-old Kwemcxenalqs Manuel-Gottfriedson's body was found just blocks away from that same Downtown Eastside SRO.
Police have said the cases are not considered connected. But MacDougall said the number of deaths over such a short period "sets off an alarm bell for a number of reasons."
"We have serial predators that are already here, that are doing serial predation in terms of sexualised violence and … drug-facilitated rape and all kinds of exploitation," she said.
"It's people that are in the neighbourhood and it's people that are coming from outside the neighbourhood. They know that there is a population of vulnerable women that is under-protected."
Both Beyene and MacDougall point to a series of factors that have caused the downturn in what was already a notoriously struggling area.
The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent closure of many services in spring 2020 saw many sources of support dry up. Skyrocketing housing costs, a lack of affordable options and a worsening toxic-drug crisis have pushed many people further into despair.
They say there is little end in sight to the violence, though recommendations on what supports are needed have been published for years.
"My heart goes out to all those families, community members and friends who are constantly dealing with this over and over again," said Beyene.
"And I think that's where the deepest injustice and frustration is coming from — that there have been plenty of warnings."
Victims' families, women's advocates demand RCMP halt plan to dispose of Robert Pickton evidence
ReplyDeleteAlmost 3 dozen groups from across Canada endorse letter raising fears that move will jeopardize unsolved cases
Chad Pawson · CBC News · December 11, 2023
The families of people murdered by Robert Pickton are among those demanding the RCMP halt its plan to return or dump thousands of pieces of evidence seized by police during the investigation into the serial killer.
The group opposing the move, which includes families, lawyers and advocates for missing and murdered women, sent a letter dated Dec. 11 to the federal public safety minister, the commissioner of the RCMP, and British Columbia's attorney general and solicitor general, calling on each "to take immediate steps to preserve Pickton evidence."
"Why in this case are they trying to erase the evidence?" said Sarah Jean de Vries at the news conference Monday morning
Her mother, who shared her name, disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in the spring of 1998. Her DNA, and that of 33 other women, was later found on Pickton's pig farm in Port Coquitlam, about 25 kilometres east of downtown Vancouver.
"They never informed my family. This has been so traumatizing for me," said Lorelei Williams about the RCMP's move to dispose of evidence.
Williams' cousin Tanya Holyk went missing in 1996 and was later named as one of Pickton's victims. Her aunt, Belinda Williams, also went missing from the Downtown Eastside nearly 50 years ago.
Pickton was found guilty in 2007 of six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of women who disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
They were Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Marnie Frey, Georgina Papin and Brenda Wolfe.
Pickton was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
In 2010, after the Supreme Court of Canada upheld his sentence, 20 further first-degree murder charges against Pickton were stayed because he was already serving the maximum sentence.
In 2020, the RCMP began filing applications to the court to obtain judicial authorizations to dispose of exhibits that were brought forward in the 2007 trial. The long list includes a woman's platform shoe and high heel, a pink pillowcase and a syringe.
'Still hold hope'
The seven-page letter released Monday, titled "A Call To Preserve Evidence In The Pickton Case," is endorsed by nearly three dozen different organizations from across Canada, including several Indigenous women's groups, as well as several academics and other people including Vancouver East MP Jenny Kwan.
The letter is co-signed by Sue Brown, a director and staff lawyer with the group Justice for Girls, and Dr. Sasha Reid, who is behind a database of missing people and unsolved murders in Canada.
"For the families of those victims, justice has been elusive and they still hold hope that one day they will know what happened to their loved ones," it says.
"Disposal of the exhibits will quash any remaining hope they have and solidify their perception that their daughters, mothers, sisters and aunties are less important than the space required to keep that evidence," reads the letter.
continued below
Both Brown and Reid said they were surprised police were looking to dispose of evidence, considering the amount of cases that are associated with Pickton.
ReplyDelete"Twenty years is a very short period of time in the life of an unsolved homicide case, not to mention 50 unsolved homicide cases," said Brown. "Why are they getting rid of this evidence so soon?"
In addition to a moratorium on dispersing or destroying the Pickton evidence, the letter also asks for legislative reform over how evidence from unsolved cases is managed; strengthened accountability within the RCMP; and prioritizing police resources for unsolved missing women's cases related to Pickton, "to ensure that they are capable of leading to prosecutions and remedies for victims."
The group behind the letter says the latest of five previous applications it's aware of from the RCMP is scheduled to be heard in B.C. Supreme Court in late January 2024.
Evidence preserved: RCMP
The RCMP said it acknowledges how many Canadians, especially victims' families, have been affected by the Pickton investigation and trial.
"Their loss is immeasurable and irrevocable," said a statement from Staff Sgt. Kris Clark with the RCMP's B.C. division headquarters in Surrey.
The statement said that although the RCMP uses the word "disposal" on its applications, the evidence has been captured and retained. Any disposal of property, which will be decided by the courts, would not affect future prosecution, the statement added.
"To put it simply, the RCMP is not authorized to retain property indefinitely and is making application to the court for disposition of that property," said the statement.
The process is required by law with the intended purpose of returning property "to the rightful owners, where applicable, or for the disposal of items not claimed."
The RCMP said it has been working closely with victims' families and First Nations to return belongings and ensure the evidence is dealt with in a culturally sensitive way.
AG demands 'sensitivity,' 'appropriate engagement'
In a statement issued through her ministry, B.C. Attorney General Niki Sharma said she understood the court was being provided with submissions from federal lawyers over how to avoid dealing with the evidence so as not to "jeopardize the integrity of future investigations."
She cautioned that any process of disposal must tread carefully.
"It is important that the court supervise a process that ensures any dispersal of evidence will be conducted with sensitivity and involving appropriate engagement with the families of victims," she said.
"Where the province can continue offer our assistance and support to those efforts, we will provide it, especially considering the immense grief and pain these families have gone through, and continue to go through."
When CBC News contacted the federal government for comment, a spokesperson with Public Safety Canada said the RCMP was best positioned to answer questions about the matter.
To see the photos, video and links embedded in this article go to:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/robert-pickton-serial-killer-rcmp-dispose-evidence-1.7055215
How a Sex Work Scholar Earned the Order of Canada
ReplyDeleteInside Frances Shaver’s remarkable career. A Tyee Q&A.
by Jeevan Sangha, The Tyee July 16, 2024
When Frances Shaver found out she was appointed to the Order of Canada in recognition of her research on the sex industry, she felt surprised and honoured. Shaver is a professor emeritus in Concordia University’s department of sociology and anthropology, where she taught sociology and was a leading national voice in advocacy for the rights of sex workers.
The Order of Canada is the second-highest level of distinction in the Canadian honours system appointed to leaders from all sectors of society.
In June, she was appointed by the Governor General of Canada alongside 63 professionals including recording artist Avril Lavigne, filmmaker and artist Sylvia D. Hamilton and Vancouver-based human rights activist Joe Average.
“People always tell me that [my research] was pathfinding and groundbreaking,” Shaver told The Tyee. “But I couldn’t have gotten there without all the others I’ve worked with. It’s an honour that I absolutely share with all the sex workers, allies, organizations and students that I’ve worked with because they all made it possible.”
Shaver retired from Concordia in 2017 and now lives in Vancouver. At a time when conversations about sex work were and continue to be highly stigmatized and contentious, her work is celebrated for its thoughtfulness and respectfulness, centring the experiences and voices of sex workers while meaningfully addressing the social stigma and moralizing that have been part of how sex work has been understood in the public imagination.
In her early days conducting research on the sex industry in the 1980s, Shaver explained that traditional data sources, such as crime statistics, police reports and clinical and social agency data, problematically viewed sex work as a crime and those participating in it as victims of coercion. It was then that she saw the importance of treating sex workers as the experts of their own experiences.
“We really need to take seriously this notion that the sex workers themselves are the experts,” she told The Tyee. “They need to be telling us what they need in that industry to make themselves respected and have all the human rights that accrue to them as members of our society.”
In over 50 years of work, Shaver pushed for the decriminalization of sex work through evidence and data in consulting roles for the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women and Canada’s Department of Justice. She was a founding member of Sex Trade Advocacy and Research, a group that allowed researchers to work in tandem with sex workers to ameliorate sex worker health, well-being and safety.
In 2008, Shaver was called as an expert witness for three sex workers who conducted a landmark charter challenge known as the Bedford case, which successfully argued that three provisions of Canada’s Criminal Code related to the prohibition of sex work were unconstitutional.
Shaver spoke to The Tyee about what she has learned about the landscape of sex work in Canada throughout her career, the challenges she faced and the work that still needs to be done. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: Can you describe your early days at the University of British Columbia? What was campus like, and what was the landscape of sex work at this time?
Frances Shaver: Well, it was way back in 1963 when I started my BA in sociology and English. Brock Hall was still there and they were still producing those absolutely fabulous cinnamon buns. There was no student centre at the time. But since then, there have been enormous changes. It’s almost difficult to recognize the campus now.
continued below
Sex work research wasn’t so much of an interest to me then, and I didn’t know very much about it at all. But when I started to work as a community worker at First United Church [in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside], back in 1967, I ended up coming up with a job that included [visiting] the city jail.
ReplyDeleteMost of the women that I met, of course, were involved in the sex industry in one way or another. It certainly was an industry that was highly stigmatized, both for anybody involved in working in it and the industry itself. The buyers, the clients, nobody really seemed to worry about them or comment on them at the time.
In your years building relationships and trust with sex workers, what have you learned about community-based academic approaches to researching sex work? Why has this been important to you in your career?
When I was doing my research, there were not really sex workers’ organizations to talk to. I mean, when I was working for the Fraser Committee (a special committee formed by the federal government to study problems associated with pornography and prostitution), the two I was most familiar with were the Alliance for the Safety of Prostitutes (ASP) and the Canadian Organization for the Rights of Prostitutes (CORP).
Between the two organizations, they were quite diverse, and this is one of the key lessons I learned at a number of levels about people and organizations involved in the sex industry. ASP was made up of women who probably were less comfortable with their work in the industry. They really wanted out, but they also didn’t want to go to jail because of the way the laws were formulated.
CORP, on the other hand, came at it from an entirely different manner. “We’re professionals, and we like what we’re doing, and we’re doing a good job, and we’re meeting a need, and this is what we want to do.”
I felt that this was just simply representing diversity in the industry. It didn’t necessarily mean that one was right and one was wrong, or that one was more living with false consciousness than the other. The notion that things were just so different and diverse and complex than traditionally represented was really an important lesson for me.
And some of the data that I was collecting and putting together back in the early days really falsifies popular perceptions. So, not all sex workers are victims of abuse. Not all sex work involves coercion. And many women work for themselves.
Strategic comparisons really gave us the idea that, well, maybe it’s not sex work that’s the problem. The most undesirable effects of prostitution are really linked to broader social problems, rather than the commercialization of sex.
Your recommendations for the government regarding the decriminalization of sex work received opposition, particularly amongst second-wave feminists. Why do you think that is, and would you say those perceptions have changed since then?
When I started, it really was a time that my work was not taken seriously at all. I mean, I had colleagues who really demanded, how could I support decriminalization and still say I was a feminist?
I argued that I was supporting it based on the evidence and the data that were available. Back in 1983 when I was writing for the advisory council, I was able to say I think the best way to go with this, the most appropriate legal approach, is decriminalization.
We also need to do something about the stigma and victimization approach while recognizing that some [sex workers] might be victims. It’s absolutely essential that we recognize that the vast majority aren’t.
And that was tricky because in those days, it seemed to me that feminists would argue that they were supporting prostitution, but really they were supporting women sex workers.
They saw them as victims that needed to be protected, and really shouldn’t be being arrested.
continued below
On the other hand, they didn’t care much about the clients. They supported the sex workers, but not prostitution, not the sex industry. That, they wanted abolished entirely.
ReplyDeleteSo in the articles that I wrote, I was trying to make clear that you could support women and you could support the industry. What you couldn’t support was the violence and the extortion and the coercion that may well have been happening within the industry.
But you know, it wasn’t just my colleagues. [It was also] friends at dinner parties, for example. I remember one woman saying to me over dinner, “How can you talk about prostitution and human rights in the same sentence?”
I would say [perceptions] have changed to some extent since then, in part because of the legitimacy and respect that now goes along with [sex work] research, both in terms of the veracity and the integrity of the data and also the kind of approach that’s taken when you’re involved in community-based research.
I did a lot of hoop-jumping each time I would get more involved with a different group or a different leader [of a sex worker organization].
There was this lack of trust for researchers, which I certainly respected because I think, and well and truly so, we are to be not necessarily trusted. It’s important that we earn that trust in terms of how we’re relating to people.
Looking forward, what still needs to change when it comes to our perceptions and treatment of sex workers in Vancouver, and particularly those whose sex work experiences are seen as more or less worthy of care?
Well, sex work and sex workers are still stigmatized, marginalized, and they’re still seen as vulnerable. The Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform has been involved in leading a [constitutional] challenge, and they want to get to the Supreme Court.
They wanted to be interveners and participate in a case concerning the constitutionality of sex work laws based on sex workers’ charter rights, and so that’s currently ongoing, and they were denied.
Now, there are no sex workers or sex work organizations that have been allowed to intervene and participate in that court case, and yet the court case is all about their lives, it’s all about their work, and it’s all about them.
There are certainly ways in which things haven’t changed. I still think a lot of our policy is still driven by ideology and morality than by justice, evidence and a better understanding of the industry.
I feel at some levels, the old arguments for decriminalization and the normalization of the sex industry have to still be made. I mean, it’s exhausting. I and others were making them back in 1985, and we’re still making them in 2024.
But there are some important things to celebrate, too. Sex work organizations [supporting] sex workers are stronger and more visible than ever before.
We know more about sex work and its related activities than ever before, and we know about it in a sympathetic, methodological, reliable manner. Our alliances have expanded, which I think is really important. We have sex workers and service workers and health and education practitioners, lawyers, police, researchers, policymakers, communicators, and even citizens have been participating in those kinds of alliances.
That all means that there are a whole new set of opportunities for strategic actions emerging, which would involve social policy reform, funding opportunities, influencing public opinion.
So while I still bemoan the fact that we’re still fighting similar battles, we’ve got more people and a much more diverse group of people fighting those battles than we did before.
I think at some point, it’s just going to have to get better. And it is getting better.
to see the links and photos embedded in this article go to:
https://thetyee.ca/News/2024/07/16/Sex-Work-Scholar-Order-Canada/