Around the world you see
you and me is all you need
Love is everything
It’s so easy
— “The Streets Where You Live”

I haven’t heard the song yet, it’s only just been released and for some reason I can’t download it from the “Buried Heart Society” Website. Fortunately, the society — a non-profit organization that funds a treatment centre for drug addicted women on Vancouver’s infamous Downtown Eastside — provides the lyrics on its site, indicating in brackets which Canadian rock luminary (Gordon Downie, Sarah Harmer, David Usher, …) sings which verse. The lines quoted above comprise the chorus and are sung by the likes of Esthero and Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy.

“The Streets Where You Live” was undoubtedly written by genuinely concerned people with a desire to transform the grisly reality of life on the Downtown Eastside — the crushing cycle of poverty, drug addiction and prostitution, which among its other myriad outrages allowed for the virtually unnoticed disappearances over sixty women. Buried Heart’s goal is to raise both awareness and funding. It’s a laudable goal. Yet, it is difficult after all that’s occurred in this city in the past ten or so years not to wince a little at the simplicity of the lyrics — “Everybody wants to provide / evidence of human touch / evidence of human kind.”

Even a cursory look at the macabre and farcical circumstances surrounding the disappearance and search for the dozens of women police now believe were murdered by Robert Pickton flies in the face of wistful imaginings of a concerned, nurturing community. For the families of the disappeared women, and for years, nobody — at least nobody who counted — wanted to provide evidence of ‘human touch’ when it came to these women. In terms of public concern, even less evidence could be found of ‘human kind.’

~

This unpleasant reality has got to be my starting point. There’s no point trying to delve into the mind of a serial killer or piece together the last horrible moments of a murder victim. Far better to make a positive, pro-active gesture such as that of the Buried Heart Society — to focus on who the women were in life, and on women from the same circumstances whose lives can be made better now, today.

The challenge of writing an essay like this one, however, is not to descend into platitude, much as the author might yearn to. When emotions are running high, when horror and outrage deepens beyond expression, the tendency is to fall back on cliché. Who wants to find a language for such feelings in the first place? The idea of speaking cogently of such horror feels almost like an insult. We shouldn’t need a vocabulary for this.

What we need is a cool-headed critique of the societal circumstances that allowed for this to happen. You won’t find that here. All I can do is touch upon the strange ways we as a culture respond when something this awful and wrong occurs — the blame games we engage in, the cultural boogey-men we burn in effigy, the security blankets we cling to. All I can do is make a case for the endless complexity of it all and argue for the absolute necessity of embracing that complexity in direct refutation of our need to gloss it over with simplistic sentiment. We owe that much to the disappeared.

Media Truism the First: We live in a culture where women are objectified, violence is glorified and violence against women is sexualized.

As a young feminist, I would have been all over this one. After all, it’s essentially, true. The problem is the solutions we have tended to formulate in response. Criminalization of such images has led to the persecution of legitimate artists and businesses (think Little Sisters bookstore). By the same token, Hollywood — and American pop culture in general — has furnished a convenient scapegoat to aid us in our denial of the systematic injustices and perversions entrenched within our own society. The Columbine shootings, for example, were widely blamed on heavy metal and video games, without a single examination of what role suburban, middle-American values might have played.

Try as I might, I am unable to sustain any but the most tenuous connection between what happened to the women from the Downtown Eastside and the latest Brian DePalma movie. I am not saying that violence-against-women-as-entertainment might not have played a role, and I’m sure as hell not saying that the status of women as a whole was not a factor in the end these women came to. I am saying it’s not that simple.

Maybe we need to step back and ask: why is sex, in general, so twisted and sad in our culture? Why is it vast numbers of people will leap on the opportunity to exploit the poor and addicted to get it? Scores of women are working the streets of Vancouver right now because of something fundamental in our society — something that not just allows for this to be the case, but somehow requires it. How can it be that the most revolutionary technological advances — that is, anything having to do with the Internet — are essentially fueled by the demand for quick, limitless access to images of something as banal as naked bodies?

I’m not saying sex is bad — precisely the opposite. My question is, why do we, as a culture, want so badly for it to be? Why does it spur us to such zeniths of hypocrisy?

When a community-minded sex-trade worker like Vancouver’s Jamie Lee Hamilton attempts to reach out and provide a safe haven for her sisters on the street, she is persecuted for running a “bawdy house.” It’s as if we as a society find the idea of prostitutes as human beings needing essentials like food, community and shelter intolerable. Far better to know that our prostitutes are precisely where we most like to envision them — sashaying through the halls of a “massage parlour” or working the stroll. God forbid they have a place to call their own, like one of us.

~

This needs chewing over. It wasn’t the likes of Paul Bernardo advocating to shut down Hamilton’s establishment, which she called “Grandma’s House.” And it isn’t a consortium of pimps, johns and sex-murderers who are advocating, right now, to keep it from opening again. It was and is the police, City Hall, and, god help us, the neighbours. It was us. It is us. Back before all this happened there was one woman making a real effort to keep these women safe, and what did we do? We shut her down — for being “bawdy.”

Furthermore, much has been made, and continues to be made, of the inadequate response of the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) when women started disappearing. The police themselves have acknowledged this. They were, they claim, “short-staffed and under-funded.” In 1997, with twenty-two women missing, precisely one officer was assigned to the case. The following year, prompted by increasing media coverage, a second officer was added. There were still only two officers on the case when rumours of a serial killer started to be publicly bandied about in 1999.

Just one example out of dozens: the police couldn’t be bothered searching the now-deceased Angela Jardine’s place of residence after she disappeared and took a month to print up a missing-person bulletin. This too was attributed to understaffing and underfunding. The response of many, therefore — no doubt precisely the one police desired — has been: “Easy! We need more police, and more funding.” It’s like that scene in Catch 22 where Yossarian is treating a soldier’s leg wound only to discover, once the leg is patched up, that the man’s guts are falling out. The problem was not that “police” in general are short-staffed and under-funded, but that the manpower and money allotted to this investigation were meager to the point of non-existence.

If you find yourself sympathizing with the cash-strapped VPD, turn your attention to the case of Robin Sharpe. Surely you’ve heard. An admitted pornographer specializing in literature about underage boys, Sharpe, nevertheless, did not kidnap, hurt or murder anyone. No one disappeared in connection with Robin Sharpe, there were not twenty-two bereft families (the number increasing every day) lighting up the VPD switchboard daily in desperation for news of their missing daughters, sisters and mothers. There was no one putting up homemade missing-person signs and scouring the streets in response to police reluctance to do the same.

Yet, remarkably, the VPD threw themselves body-and-soul into building a case against, and bringing to trial, a man who was eventually found guilty of no more than two counts of “possessing child pornography.” Where was all this effort and energy when Angela Jardine’s mother called wanting to know where her daughter had gone?

To date three lawsuits have been filed against the VPD by families of the murdered women. Parents are claiming to have collected clues leading to the accused Robert Pickton long before police announced their findings on his property.

I wanted to show that things are complicated, but I find myself edging closer and closer to the conclusion that things are worse than complicated. I am afraid we might be crazy. Our culture’s inexorable loathing of the poor combined with still-pervasive misogyny and a collective neurosis when it comes to sex allows our media to ignore, for years, impoverished and drug-addicted women being plucked from the streets. Yet at the same time, a nation-wide lynch-mob mentality is effortlessly invoked against the products of one man’s imagination.

With the yawning void left by sixty-five women staring us in the face, we yearn to believe that standing opposed to this kind of inexplicable chaos is something solid and true we can cling to. We need that solid and true thing to be, above all, human — controvertibly and undeniably human, the same way a small, balding man nicknamed Willy appears human, despite the mounting, horrific evidence. We look to our institutions to refute this awful reality — our police and our government and our communities. We look for assurances that we know right from wrong, good from bad, and that when the time comes to stand against human suffering, we will recognize it on sight and act without hesitation.

Just like the song says, It’s so easy.