This week I wanted to address the issue of the Willie Pickton case and his victims. In  the video we watched in class we learned about Dawn in particular, this video really struck me because so often we forget that these women were real people, who had lives and people who loved them. The Media circus so often only uses these stories for entertainment value. This makes people seem so far away, and unreal. Going off this point I’d like to address the fact that after the trials many crime drama shows like criminal minds created story lines based off of the Pickton case. To me this seems wrong, this makes these women’s stories no longer about the suffering of them and their families but rather about some shows story line and ratings. It also emphasizes the gore and violence of the murders opposed to the aftermath. Exploiting these stories and transforming them into something for people to consume, detracts from the suffering of these women’s families and further separates their stories from the public.

I feel like in order for these women’s stories to be taken seriously the media must stop putting an emphasis on turning these events into a spectacle. We must not turn them into something to consume for entertainment. This issue is an important one to tackle because so often when we hear stories on the news or watch them played out on television shows, we often forget that these are real people whose stories deserve to be heard. And that in order to stop things like this from happening we have to address the root of the problem, and that is environments like the Downtown East side.

This brings me to my third point about the video I would like to discuss what her brother said about the police not caring because these women were poor and often had drug problems. I feel like this speaks volumes about what is wrong with our society today. Instead of trying to help people who have fallen down so often our society blames and shames them, making recovery extremely difficult. This scenario seems to happen more often to First Nations women, which can create unfortunate and untrue stereotypes that again make us forget that these are real people. I can remember clearly when the Pickton trial was being played on T.V, someone said to me that the reason he was able to get away with this for so long was because the women he preyed on were “poor drug addicted runways, who no cared about when they went missing” from the evidence in the movie obviously this was not the case women like Dawn had plenty of people who cared about her, they just didn’t have the socio-economic status to garner attention. This is a problem because it makes women like Dawn, who need the most help from society the most vulnerable. And when they get victimized society blames them for being addicted to drug or being prostitutes instead of looking at what they could have don’t to help out women like Dawn. This is why marches like the one they held today are so important because they force people to take notice of these women as people not just as drug addicts on the fringe of society. And it forces us to take responsibility for the treatment of these women.

To sum everything up we as a society must stop blaming the victims and instead focus on helping them up so that crimes like this wont happen anymore.