This week’s scholarly reading, Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse by Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lynn Young and the documentary video, Through a Blue Lens produced by the National Film Board of Canada sparked new knowledge in learning about the lives of the locals residing Downtown Eastside, Vancouver. This topic about sex-work, drug addiction were things that I have always heard about from a far in health classes in middle school and through the news media mainly CNN and BBC. But imagining that now I am living in the same city and witnessing many homeless people in Vancouver, I felt actively engaged while reading this article. However, the reading left me with a sad and hopeless thought that the case of the missing women will always be left in the periphery. Myself, having no power in taking this into action, just nod my head and accepted the reality. After reading the article, I realized how the media is a powerful tool in manipulating information and how it can shift the main focus by using the “blaming the victim” (908) approach.

Visual media such as Through a Blue Lens, have done an excellent job in representing the marginalized by giving the chance to the people living in Downtown Eastside Vancouver that many have come from “good strong families” as one police officer explains. After watching the video and hearing from the victims, it was their choice and their decision of becoming who they are today. Typically, people would think they chose the wrong path to life, but on the other hand, if we take our “humanistic” lens, we can view that all human beings make mistakes, we all do. “We” are not like “them” because we have loving families and have all the available and necessary resources, like family love, unconditional support from friends and parents. Many of the victims in the documentary were often abused by their parents and just did not have enough and proper resources around them. Even though I was disguised by watching their lives in the streets wandering with no direction in life, one thing I realized was that they are human beings and “they” like “us” have a “sense of humanity” (903).

Throughout the article, Jiwani and Young argue that the problem lie on the misrepresentation of marginality in the News Media because sometimes without critical thinking we tend to believe what is said on the news and unconsciously through the representation of the media we get drawn to what they are saying. For example, as Zoonen and Young argues that  “crime-news norms” are considered the most “masculinist” example of media practices people. In the case of Robert Pickton, the media is manipulative in such a way that “shifts” its main focus (the Missing Women) to “Pickton, his family, and his property” (905). If the media continues this method, the public would automatically would be more curious of who caused the problem rather that than most important subject, the victim, who was accused and who is being marginalized.

I do strongly believe that there is still hope if female journalists like Lindsay Kines, Kim Bolan and Lori Culbert who portray the image of sex-workers in the News Media not just as “sex-workers” and “drug addicts” but representing from a humanistic perspective who were once just like us, coming “from caring families” (903) that they were “mothers, daughters and sisters” to create sympathy to the public, practicing social responsibility.