Working from the Violent Centre: Survival Sex Work and Urban Aboriginality in Maria Campbell's Halfbreed‪.‬

From the early 1970s until 2002, at least fifty-nine women--more than half of whom were Aboriginal, (1) and many of whom were street-level sex workers--disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown East Side. Their disappearances from within this small neighbourhood in what has been labelled Canada's poorest postal code were treated with little interest by Vancouver police and municipal officials for two and a half decades. In February 2002, a recently-formed joint RCMP-city police task force charged a Port Coquitlam farmer with the murder of seven of the missing women. At the time of writing, Robert Pickton has been convicted of murdering six of the missing women: Marnie Frey, Georgina Papin, Brenda Wolfe, Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, and Andrea Joesbury. Pickton's lawyers are appealing this conviction; if they fail, federal prosecutors will not try Pickton for the pending twenty additional counts of first-degree murder--a decision not without significant public controversy. To date, however, many of the disappeared women are yet to be accounted for. As the Vancouver investigation has unfolded (and as upwards of twenty more women are now missing from the same Vancouver streets), (2) a number of other serial kidnap and murder cases involving poor, racialized, and/or street-level sex workers have made headlines, particularly in Western Canada. In Edmonton, an RCMP and Edmonton police task force was formed in 2003 to investigate eighty-three cases, dating back to 1982, of murdered and disappeared women. A serial killer murdered four First Nations women and was suspected of killing at least three others in Saskatoon in the early 1990s. In addition, there have been a series of disappearances and violent murders in Winnipeg that police have only begun to investigate.