Mediated complicity: Sex work, the state and missing women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

More than sixty women disappeared from the streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside between 1978 and 2001. This study examines newspaper coverage of the arrest and trial of Robert Pickton, the man accused (and on six counts convicted) of murdering 26 of those women, all sex workers who worked on the neighborhood's strolls. I consider the analyses provided by the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and the National Post and argue that they were instrumental in demonstrating that a consideration of the serial killer himself was entirely inadequate to explain what had happened in the Downtown Eastside. Their narratives established police negligence, the social dislocation of street-involved women and the particular perils of living in the Downtown Eastside as core themes of the story. Yet by scrutinizing the definitions provided by these newspapers, I demonstrate that the dominant themes that emerge from their coverage provide explanations which insufficiently consider the range of instruments and assumptions which operated to imperil the women that disappeared. I argue that the coverage effectively reduces the case to a series of contingencies and camouflages the functioning of cultural and structural systems of domination. It offers, I contend, a series of coherent explanations that hold particular individuals and practices accountable but largely omit, conceal, or erase altogether the broader socio-political context that rendered those practices possible.;I elaborate this contention in four core arguments, each of which corresponds to a chapter of this project. In the first substantive chapter I argue that the coverage's focus on police negligence provides a compelling way to understand how more than sixty women could disappear. But by overemphasizing this explanation, I suggest, the state's role in the crisis is limited to personal and bureaucratic failure and broader considerations of its culpability are effectively minimized. The next chapter extends this analysis by looking carefully at three core ways that the state itself might be implicated in the violence. Here, I look carefully at the relationship between the crisis and the retrenchment of state systems of social solidarity, the ongoing effects of colonial violence and the criminal regulation of prostitution. The following chapter examines how the coverage operates to establish street-involved sex workers as morally and socially distinct from other women and argues that such renderings operate to make their presence in the 'dangerous' inner-city understandable, an important discursive move that helps to rationalize and explain the violence committed against them. The final chapter argues that the neighborhood itself is produced as a space of chaos and criminality. I challenge such renderings by demonstrating how particular economic and political patterns have operated to isolate the Downtown Eastside from other city spaces and to concentrate particular social phenomena there. The thread that courses through all of these chapters is an attempt to reveal that the coverage's prevailing explanations are 'ideological,' inadequate and incomplete.