Discourses of Blame: An Analysis of Media Coverage in the Robert Pickton Case

When most Canadians consume their news media, they don't often consider the underlying narratives of colonialism, racism, and classism that can be spread through media representations of marginalized peoples. Such is the case with Indigenous women in Canada, who die violently at five times the rate of other Canadian women, but are given three and a half times less coverage in the media than white women for similar cases. News media articles covering Indigenous women's deaths are also less in-depth and less likely to make the front page. Prior to the apprehension of Robert “Willy” Pickton in 2002, media coverage of the dozens of missing women on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside was minimal, and often portrayed the women as the harbingers of their own misfortune. The Vancouver Police Department also failed to take action, citing the women’s “transient lifestyles” as reason to believe they would return soon. However, even after widespread recognition of the issue began, media coverage continued to attribute a level of “blameworthiness” to the missing and murdered by regularly engaging with tropes and stereotypes that individualized the acts of violence against them. In this paper, I look to explore that phenomenon by asking how the women of the Downtown Eastside are named as culpable or blameworthy in the violence enacted against them, as evidenced in the media coverage of the Robert Pickton case. My analysis found that while an identifiable killer like Pickton provided the news media a temporary cause for the women’s deaths, sex-working and drug using women maintained blame in the public eye both during and long after the case, due in equal parts to their use of drugs, their status as sex workers, and their proximity to “tainted” geographical regions like the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. As evidenced by this research, Indigenous women are continually and systemically blamed for the violence enacted against them. Keywords: MMIWG, sex work, media bias, Downtown Eastside, gendered violence

Other People's Problems: Missing Women, Murderers, and the Media

There are over 600 missing and murdered aboriginal women across Canada. A long history of systemic racism has made these women extremely vulnerable to violent crimes. Most of their fates remain a mystery, but some murderers have been caught who are responsible for their deaths. I examined the news articles that cover the crimes of convicted murderers Robert Pickton and John Martin Crawford. Of the two, only Pickton is very well known. However, while the media covered his crimes extensively, much of the coverage is misleading. The aboriginality of the victims is downplayed, and other tactics are used to blame the victims and focus on the killer. The coverage surrounding John Martin Crawford uses similar misleading strategies, although there is significantly less of it. I argue that because the aboriginality of the victims was emphasized instead of downplayed in the coverage of Crawford’s murders, there was less interest in the cases. Most people will read about crimes when they can identify with the victims. While most of Pickton’s victims were aboriginal, the number of victims was so enormous and the details of the case were so grisly, that the aboriginality was downplayed to attract the attention that these other aspects gave the case. Crawford’s victims were all aboriginal women, but he killed fewer and was not seen as a threat. The media influences how people think about society. If the media continues to treat these types of crimes in this way, the ideas that fuel these crimes will also continue.

Person(s) of Interest and Missing Women: Legal Abandonment in the Downtown Eastside

The criminal prosecution of Robert Pickton involved an eleven-month jury trial, two appeals to the British Columbia Court of Appeal, an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, and seventy-six reported judicial rulings. This article, through a combination of discursive and doctrinal analyses of these seventy-six decisions, examines what was (not) achieved by the Pickton trial. It discusses three areas: the judicial representation of the women Pickton was prosecuted for murdering; the implications of the jury’s verdict in the Pickton proceedings; and the impact of the Pickton trial on the families of the women he murdered. The article starts from the premise that it is correct to characterize these murders as a product of collective violence. Colonialism, political and legal infrastructure, and public discourse—and hegemonies based on race, class, and gender that these processes, institutions, and practices hold in place—produced a particular class of vulnerable women, the police who failed them, and Robert Pickton. The article concludes by suggesting that the outcomes of the Pickton prosecution both highlight the limitations of the criminal justice system and offer an analytical framework for examining other institutional responses (such as the Missing Women’s Inquiry) to the kind of collective violence that gave rise to the Pickton circumstance.