Within the past week, we have read Jiwani and Young’s article, “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse” and watched the “Through a Blue Lens” documentary made my the Vancouver Police Department. A large focus in both is the conditions of Vancouver’s downtown east side. In the documentary, there is overall theme of teaching the bad that drugs can do to one’s life and body. The whole film focuses of close ups of many of the drug-dependent people that live downtown; such shots include scars, cuts and even seeing themselves injecting the drugs, followed by their actions after taking these substances and the loss of control for their actions that they experience. It is a very moving form of teaching that helps to prevent kids from getting into drugs, because of its scare factor, which essentially is the documentary’s purpose. We also see how many of these people that are now drug-dependent and living on the streets in the downtown east side had positive futures ahead of them. An example was a man named randy, who had been on the streets for around 10 years at the time of the documentary, who was a successful hockey player who had potential to one day play in the NHL, but instead he had gotten into hard drugs and his life turned around.

From this, we can better understand Jiwani and Young’s article about many of the women who lived in the downtown eastside, drug-dependent sex workers, that went missing and where killed. By watching the documentary, one can understand that these women did have more than just their lives on the streets before them. Throughout the article, many of these women are referred to as forgotten, not wanted, or abandoned and both Jiwani and Young try to tell a different story that they where more than just another woman, they are mothers, sisters, daughters, and even wives. It was until after hundreds of women went missing that they had found two men guilty of the majority of the deaths.