EVERYONE DESERVES THE SAME PROTECTION

A Daily News editorial by Susan Duncan

Although it's common knowledge now that more than 60 women have been taken
off the streets of Vancouver, presumed dead, it's sickening each time more
names are added to the list of charges against pig farmer Robert Pickton.

It's horrifying because these people were quite obviously treated as though
they were as disposable as a used candy wrapper. It's equally tragic that
so few others cared they were missing. In hindsight, it seems
incomprehensible that so many women from one area of a city could go
missing over a few years and a full-scale alert not be issued.

However, the victims were drug-addicted prostitutes, a problem for society,
which made them easy to ignore. The police have questions to answer about
why the number of missing women was allowed to grow so substantially before
proper attention was paid to the investigation.

Society has a few questions of its own to answer, starting with an
evaluation of the attention given disenfranchised citizens. While the media
is often criticized for how it treats victims, it's the news reporters who
have given identities to these murdered women. Their pictures in newspapers
and on television and interviews with their families have revealed there is
more to know about these victims than their lifestyle in Vancouver's
downtown east side.

They may have been trapped by the disease of addiction, but they were also
daughters, sisters and mothers. They were people who loved others and were
loved by their families and friends. Their deaths are a terrible tragedy
and should not be lessened because their existence did not meet with
society's approval. Nobody deserves to lose their protection because of who
they are or how they live.

Clearly these women weren't viewed as people. Whomever took them believed
they were a disposable commodity. What about the rest of us? Do we think
much differently about the drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes and street
people who live in our own community