BC Coalition of Experiential Communities

Of the nine females originally listed by the RCMP as missing along Highway 16
– a list, in retrospect, that now seems laughably small — Hoar was the sole
Caucasian, an Alberta girl who was working as a tree planter in the Prince
George area. She was also, at 25, the eldest of the nine.
The other eight were aboriginal.
Of those eight, four were 15.
When the RCMP expanded the investigation’s area of interest (reacting,
perhaps, to the insistence in the aboriginal community that many more women were
missing), the force began looking at similar cases as far afield as Alberta and
far northern B.C. Another nine names were added to the list in October 2007,
bringing the total to 18.
Aileah Saric-Auger, a high school student from Prince George, became the
youngest victim on the revised list, and the most recent. Aileah was 14, and had
gone missing in February 2006. Her body was found eight days later in a ditch
along Highway 16.
The revised list also expanded the investigation’s time span. The oldest case
now went all the way back to 1969 — Gloria Moody, found dead in Williams Lake.
Forty years would seem to test the limit of “cold case,” in that the chances of
some kind of resolution are now positively frigid. It is this growing distance
between crime and the possibility of punishment that is not only a source of
frustration for the aboriginal community, but evidence to that community of
systemic racism.
In the database of the Native Women’s Association of Canada, there are 520
“known” cases of native women going missing or being murdered, and half of those
cases have happened since 2000.
B.C. has the distinction of leading all provinces by a wide margin, with
137.
These murders and disappearances have been going on for decades, however,
including in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and critics have charged that
investigations into them lapsed because of meagre police resources or, worse,
the disinterest of society at large to pursue them. Put more bluntly,
racism.
“When I reported my sister missing,” said Lucy Glaim, of Smithers, who was
once the youth justice worker for the Wet’sewet’en Unlocking Aboriginal Justice
program, “[the RCMP officer] just said something like, ‘She’s just found a party
or something, so give her a couple of days.’”
Those couple of days turned into an eternity: Glaim’s sister, Delphine Nikal,
disappeared on the morning of June 14, 1990, while hitchhiking from Smithers to
a friend’s house in nearby Telkwa. She was never seen again. Glaim had reported
her missing the following morning. Delphine was 16.
Glaim’s niece, Cicilia Anne Nikal, had also disappeared a year earlier, and
was last seen in Smithers near Highway 16. But her name was not included on the
list of 18 because RCMP maintain she was reported missing in
Vancouver.

That scenario was contradicted in the 2006 report that came out of the
Highway of Tears Symposium in Prince George. The symposium came about because
the case file had reached such a critical mass of numbers that it could no
longer be ignored. Police, government and media were forced to take notice. It
was in that report that Cicilia Anne’s name was included, and that she was “last
seen in Smithers near Highway 16.”
There was also this remarkable paragraph in the report’s preamble:
“There is much community speculation and debate on the exact number of women
that have disappeared along Highway 16. . . . Many are saying the number of
missing women, combined with the number of confirmed murdered women, exceeds
30.”
It then goes on to say that “the exact number of missing women has yet to be
determined.”
The exact number? More than 30? The unintended dispassion of those passages
screams out at the reader. If there was the possibility of 30 or more women
going missing in, say, Dunbar, there wouldn’t be a polite “debate” about
numbers. There wouldn’t be a symposium 40 years down the road. There would be
immediate wholesale alarm.
Some 33 recommendations came out of that report, some of which have been
implemented and some not. A key one — the creation of a shuttle bus service
between communities along the highway to remove the need for poor aboriginal
women to resort to hitchhiking — has not been realized. Hitchhiking remains
common. But one recommendation that did see fruition was the creation of a
coordinator for the Highway of Tears program. The coordinator was to act as a
liaison between police, affected families and government.
Mavis Erickson, of the Carrier Sekani Family Services in Prince George, is
the present coordinator. She is concentrating her efforts, she said, on getting
the provincial government to hold an inquiry into the investigations. She has a
meeting with Attorney-General Mike de Jong in October.
“It’s been 40 years, and we haven’t had an arrest,” Erickson said. “Many
times, we talk to families of women who have been murdered or who have gone
missing, and they don’t know what’s going in on the investigations.
“Hopefully, [an inquiry] will answer some questions.”
pmcmartin@vancouversun.com, 604-605-2905

It’s Monday evening, Natal Day. While the rest of the city recovers from the
long weekend, a woman sets out for work on Agricola Street. She trolls the
strip, letting the stares and comments of passers-by roll off her back, until a
“date” stops to pick her up. They drive together to a remote part of
Bedford—an area sure to have fewer prying eyes, fewer prowling cops.
But when she asks for her money, things turn ugly. The man gets violent,
pulling a knife and holding it to her throat, before insisting the woman disrobe
and service him. After she’s done, he throws her out of the car without paying,
leaving her naked and alone at the side of a dark road.
Thought it’s an act of assault, the woman’s story doesn’t make it into the
local papers. It doesn’t get reported on the radio. The reason: her job. For sex
workers in Halifax, violence is a frighteningly common daily threat—from
harassment and beatings to knifings, rape and, occasionally, murder. But fearing
they’ll be arrested or harassed by police, many women who have been attacked on
the job tend not to report the crimes—no matter how brutal. It’s a vicious
circle in the truest sense of the word.
“People have no idea as to the violence going on against sex workers, cause
it’s not being reported,” says Rene Ross, executive director at Stepping Stone,
a non-profit organization based in the north end that supports both former and
current sex workers, most of whom do street-based “survival” sex work. Since the
majority of violent attacks go unreported, those who perpetrate the crimes get
off scot-free.
“When it is reported,” says Ross, her steady voice straining with
frustration, “it is all too often dismissed by a society that views sex workers
as disposable.”
Therein lies the rub. Our culture has a double standard when it comes to sex.
On a superficial level, we’re obsessed with it. From the softcore TV ads that
penetrate our living rooms to pole-dancing fitness classes and thongs for
tweens, there’s nothing we like more than a little titillation. It’s the real
stuff that scares us to bits: The people who sell actual sex are among
our culture’s most marginalized and vulnerable, often viewed as throwaway people
who are somehow deserving of the treatment they get.
And then there’s the criminal issue. Today, it’s legal to be a sex
worker, but illegal to do sex work or advertise your wares. That’s like
being a legal house painter and trying to run a business in a scenario where
it’s illegal to paint a house or ask anyone if they want their house painted. It
forces those who do sex work to operate underground, leaving them with little
support and very few options. And that’s why, when things go wrong, sex workers
often feel they have nobody to turn to.
Tracy (sex workers’ names have been changed for this story), a soft-spoken
woman who worked in the sex trade in Halifax for 20 years before retiring last
year, shrugs when she talks about on-the-job violence. “You can’t do anything
about it,” she says bluntly, her tone resigned.
Lynn, seated nearby, is new to the city. She’s chatty and straightforward,
saying sex workers have to deal with violence “on a continuous basis,” but that
for many, going to the police is a futile undertaking, resulting in ridicule
more often than results. As a parallel, she describes a friend in another city
who, stalked by an obsessive john, went to the police. “As soon as they found
out she was a sex-trade worker, they let it go. But what does that have to do
with anything?” says Lynn indignantly. “That guy was stalking her!” She pauses,
then says with dismay, “It just seems like we’re not important.”
In 1985, three sex workers were murdered in Halifax. The details of those
murders are becoming lost with time, but Ross relates what she’s been told: One
was named Tina Baron. A second, Brenda Garside—or Garson—was killed at the
old Waverley Hotel. A third was named Kelly, but Ross doesn’t know the woman’s
last name—”She was not the same Kelly whose body was found in the grain
elevator,” she says, placing the sex workers’ murders firmly in the context of
general violence against women.
In response to those murders, Stepping Stone was established in 1987, as a
project of the Elizabeth Fry Society, to provide peer outreach support for
people who work in the sex trade. It became independent in 1989 and is now
celebrating its 20th anniversary.
Stepping Stone operates on a “harm-reduction” model, meaning it will provide
help only when asked for: Stepping Stone doesn’t try and get people out of the
sex trade against their will, though it will support people who want to get out.
The organization currently supports about 115 people a month (about 30 percent
are former sex workers) on a budget of roughly $200,000 a year. Besides
providing housing help (the organization placed 136 people in housing last year,
though funding for that program has just been cut), court support and advocacy,
Stepping Stone also does street patrol a few nights a week, passing out condoms
and copies of the “bad date” list that describes recent violent incidents and
people to avoid.
Over pizza in Stepping Stone’s tidy kitchen, their hands wrapped around cold
bottles of root beer, Tracy and Lynn express their frustration with the way they
are often harassed by the police (though they’ll readily admit there are a
number of good ones out there, they both agree “that there are a lot of dirty
cops in this city”) and the way they are judged by the community-at-large,
because of the work they choose to do.
“I’ve been retired a year and I still get harassed,” says Tracy of the cops.
“I couldn’t even sit on my front steps and smoke a cigarette, because the police
would make me go inside ’cause they thought I was working.
“I can’t even jaywalk,” she continues wearily, “because there’s this one cop
who says if you even jaywalk, you’re gone. I try to be so good. But it’s just
like they’re always waiting.”
Sergeant Richard Lane agrees the police’s relationship with the city’s sex
workers is a complicated one. Introducing himself as “Richie,” a name that seems
too diminutive for his impossibly muscular frame, Lane, who is in charge of
“special enforcements,” has clearly spent time wrestling with the issue of how
his force deals with policing sex work.
“The majority of them are victims of one sort or another,” he says
sympathetically. “They don’t need to be victimized again by the justice system
or the police.”
And though he’s quick to mention that his unit—the vice section—has a
good relationship with “the girls on the street,” he acknowledges, subtly, that
that may not be the case in some of the other units. The struggle, says Lane, is
finding a balance between “what the public wants and what the individual
wants—we get a lot of community complaints from people who live where
prostitutes are actively walking the stroll in front of their houses.”
The problem, he says, is drugs.
Many in the community see prostitution as inherently tied in with drug
use—a problem they don’t want to see lingering on the sidewalk. But the true
relationship between the two is a deeply complicated one. Though the police may
believe that the majority of Halifax’s street-based sex workers are hooked on
crack, Stepping Stone’s staff insists that’s just an cruel stereotype.
“A lot of people work and don’t use,” says program coordinator Jeff
Liberatore. “But,” says Diane, who worked in the sex trade for 30 years before
retiring a decade ago, “a lot of people use [crack] and don’t do sex work. I
don’t see addiction and sex work together as a problem. It’s just an added
choice as a way for [addicts] to make their money, but addicts make their money
in a whole lot of different ways.” As far as she’s concerned, they’re completely
separate issues.
But crack was definitely a game changer for sex workers in Halifax. It hit
the streets with force in the early 1990s—about the same time Tracy got
involved in the business. Though she’s clean now, Tracy admits turning tricks
was an easy way to help her feed her habit. Certainly, says Tracy, crack’s
presence on the streets “brought a lot of girls down. It almost brought me
down.”
“There’s something about crack that takes over a person,” says Diane. “I’ve
used a lot of drugs in my life, but crack cocaine was one of my worst
addictions. It just consumed me more and more. My whole life was about using and
making money to get more drugs.”
That desperation has had a frightening impact on street-based sex work.
Diane, a lean, tanned woman, is blunt about the change: “The money is not out
there now, and I think they are more desperate now. It’s a lot more ’survival’
sex. When I worked the streets, the money was good. We all had set prices. When
crack came, women started dropping their prices.”
It became common for a desperate woman to turn a trick for $20—the price of
a rock of crack. “You couldn’t make any money,” says Diane. The johns “would go
see the other girls who were charging less.”
Tracy says that if she hadn’t gotten off the drug, she was “gonna be dead.”
She sums it up deftly: “There’s been a lot more violence and crime since crack
cocaine came.”
If the relationship between sex work and drugs is complicated, so is the
question of how people find themselves working in the sex trade in the first
place. “Everybody has a different reason for going into sex work,” says Ross,
“it’s not a straight cut-and-dry.”
Our culture, of course, tends to explain sex work as fuelled by drug
addiction or early childhood abuse. But more often than not, the unifying factor
is economic.
“It’s not necessarily something we love doing,” says Lynn, who says she
started in the sex trade at age 12. “We do it ’cause we have to. Because welfare
doesn’t give us enough to live off.”
Certainly, sex work can provide far more money than a full-time, minimum wage
job—an important consideration, especially for women who may be raising
children on their own.
“It’s easy money,” says Lynn bluntly, before correcting herself. “I should
say it’s not easy money, it’s fast money. I’ve had guys tell me that it must be
the easiest job. Well, sometimes I feel so dirty.” But right now, as far as
she’s concerned, sex work is her best bet.
For Diane, sex work was a better option than her job as a hotel clerk. “I had
a friend who came to see me with all this money… all these bills. So I asked,
‘How did you make all this money?’ Then I took a leave of absence from the hotel
and got into the sex trade.”
But that was 30 years ago. Today, retired sex worker Diane says she’d be
“very nervous” to work the streets. “I won’t walk my dogs out there now,” she
says. “People will kill you for $20. I’ve heard too many stories, seen too much
stuff. It’s a lot different out there now. It’s a lot more dangerous now than it
ever was.”
Adding to the danger is the frustrating “boundaries” issue: When a sex worker
is arrested, she has the option of being released with what are called “boundary
conditions”—she is banned from parts of the city where prostitution is known
to happen and is released only on condition that she sign off on a map outlining
those areas. Otherwise, she stays in jail until she can meet bail or goes to
trial.
“If a certain area gets known as an area where a john can go and pick up a
prostitute,” says Lane, “then if you take the girl out of the area, it’ll
eliminate the problem.”
Halifax is one of the last cities still using boundary conditions as a
policing tool to address prostitution, and the restrictions have only been
applied to female sex workers, not to male sex workers and not to drug dealers.
On the peninsula, the off-limits area extends from Cogswell to Young, Agricola
to Brunswick. In Dartmouth, it spans a huge swath between Windmill and Victoria,
all the way north past the MacKay Bridge.
The problem is that many of the services sex workers need to access—child
care, food banks, the North End Health Clinic, probation offices, even Stepping
Stone—are within the bounded areas. And if a woman lives within the bounded
area, she can find herself on unofficial house arrest.
If a woman is picked up in an area she’s been banned from, she’s considered
“in breach of her conditions of release” a far more serious charge than the
initial charge of “communicating.” It can lead to jail time.
Lane insists women under boundary conditions are free to come and go in a
bounded area as long as they aren’t working. “Most of them get charged with
violating the conditions when they’re back on the corner waving at cars,” he
says.
But Ross says that isn’t the case. “How do you prove to someone that you are
just going to the food bank?” she asks. “We’ve had people harassed just for
going to the grocery store.”
“A few of my girlfriends are on the methadone program,” says Tracy. The
clinic on Gottingen Street is within the bounded area. For them, getting
treatment means risking arrest. “It’s so frustrating. And the cops love that.
It’s the only thing they have—it’s the only way they have to get us now.”
“Is it the best solution?” asks Lane of boundary restrictions. “Probably not
the best. But it’s the best solution we have for the problem.” As he sees it,
getting women off the streets—getting them healthy, getting them jobs and
getting them “away from the abuses they suffer,” is the goal.
Ross, however, says the only way to decrease the abuse sex workers suffer is
decriminalization, which would put “power back into the hands of sex workers,”
allowing them to maintain their independence with more protection and less
harassment. A better relationship with the police would presumably decrease the
violence and would improve working conditions.
In his report on violence in Halifax, the result of mayor Peter Kelly’s
Roundtable on Violence, criminologist Don Clairmont recommended that Halifax
create sanctioned red-light and stroll areas for sex workers. But Ross says this
type of legalization of sex work won’t necessarily solve the violence problem.
“Where would a red-light district go in Halifax?” she asks. “Way out where the
women are being attacked now? It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.”
Though they’re not always obvious, there are currently unofficial strolls all
over HRM—including in Dartmouth, Sackville, Bedford and Fairview. “People say,
‘Where are they? I don’t see sex workers on the street.’ But all that means is
that sex work is being pushed further and further into the margins,” says
Ross.
Sex work has moved to back alleys and industrial parks—where it’s far more
risky for the women. Because they’re afraid of getting caught by the cops, Tracy
says women will sometimes jump in a car before they have time to assess whether
conditions are safe. “Sometimes you’ll throw caution to the wind and you’ll go
with someone who you don’t know. Like this guy, he took me, I don’t know
where—somewhere in the country and then he started getting violent. And what
could I do? I took off out of his truck and hitchhiked back to town.”
“Quite a few rapes and beatings happen outside of the city,” Ross says
carefully. “I’ve heard about women tied to trees, raped, drugged.” She’s quiet
for a minute, struggling to explain the brutality and hate some sex workers have
to deal with, then says simply, “If someone is willing to rape or beat a sex
worker within an inch of her life, he’s not an upstanding member of society. I
don’t see how that’s not going to translate to other violent crimes.”
“If somebody is sexually assaulted with a knife held to her throat—somebody
who does that to a prostitute would obviously do that to somebody else,” agrees
Lane. “It’s just the opportunity is there for them to get those girls into a
car, and that’s the big danger.”
In Toronto, a group of police officers works solely on cases of assault
against sex workers. Halifax, however, doesn’t have those kinds of resources.
The man who left the naked woman at the side of the road on Natal Day was
eventually picked up by the police—but only because the woman, too vulnerable
to do anything else, called for help.
But the average john picked up by the police (they’re caught trying to pick
up decoy women) merely pays a fine and is sent to “john school” where he learns
“the truth about what really goes on” in the sex trade. Lane says he rarely sees
a john arrested a second time.
For Lane, policing prostitution is a delicate balancing act. “The violence is
a huge issue,” he says, “and the quality of life issues for our public that live
in the areas [where sex workers work] is an issue.” The solution to keeping sex
workers safe, he says, is to “get these girls off the street” and into better
situations. He says if a sex worker has been the victim of a violent crime,
police will look past the prostitution offence out of concern for their safety.
But Lane is clear: as long as sex work is criminalized, it will be policed.
Rene Ross writes the words “sex worker” on a piece of paper. Then she draws a
circle around “sex” over and over again.
“At the end of the day,” she says, without lifting her pencil, “it’s about
the morality of this. It’s the reason for the marginalization, the
stigmatization.”
If there’s one thing Ross wants people to understand, it’s that sex work is
work, and that the people who choose to do it for a living deserve the
same safe working conditions and harassment-free living as anyone else. What
she’d like to see is a climate where violence is taken seriously—and where the
police listen to sex workers, rather than victimizing them.
“I want them to know that I’m somebody’s daughter,” says Tracy. “That I’m a
mother, somebody’s friend. And that we’re just trying to make it in this world,
just like any other human being.”
Meredith Dault is a freelance writer and sometime broadcast
journalist. She’d like to thank everyone who graciously offered up their brain
for picking in the writing of this article.