A History of Invisibility

Many people across the country were upset with media reports earlier this year of the brutal murders of drug-dependent women who sell sex from street corners in Vancouver’s skid row. They did not want to read the graphic accounts of the horrific murders. They did not want to hear about the testimony in court suggesting that women’s bodies were butchered and disposed of as if they were pigs.

How naive it was to anticipate anything else. For decades, Vancouver pretended not to see the open-air drug markets and curb side prostitutes in the city’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. Police were deaf to cries for an investigation into the disappearance of the women. Federal, provincial and municipal leaders ignored pleas to help make a difference in the lives of some of the community’s most damaged people.

Two recent books draw much-needed attention to those dark corners of the city. Well-known journalist Stevie Cameron, in The Pickton File, writes about...