Proactive Missing Persons Reports
This is what the Downtown Eastside has come to. Just when one thinks it is as bad as it can ever possibly get, it gets worse.
A group called the Society for the Advancement of Marginalized Persons has begun a new initiative. The Self-Monitoring Program registers women who are considered at-risk, have those women fill out a missing persons report, have their photographs taken, and have the women provide a lock of hair to provide a DNA sample. Then the women are contracted to call in several times daily to let organizers know they are alive and well, or at least alive. Any and all women who feel they fit the profile of potential victim are encouraged to register.
All to provide these women with some reassurance that, in the event that they go missing, someone will actually notice and take steps to find them.
This is one of the saddest projects about which I have ever heard.
It is absolutely appalling that some women are so totally dehumanized that they have come to accept the fact that the only people who can and will look out for them are themselves. The disappearances of sixty-three women from the little piece of hell these women call home proved to them that they are on their own.
Every person with an IQ in the double digits knows that Robert Pickton did not act alone in the serial murders of the 23 women he stands accused of killing. The man hasn't got the brains God gave a turnip, he had help with this atrocity, or he was the "help". That means the women of the Downtown Eastside are still vulnerable, not only to the daily violence that is part of their reality, but to the threat of horrible, senseless death at the hands of a monster.
That these women are forced to check in with strangers in order to get searchers out looking for them in the event of a disappearance is monumentally tragic. If a women is "reliable" with her call-ins, a search will be launched the evening of her disappearance (after the final call-in time has lapsed). If a woman has proven herself to be "unreliable", the search will not begin until the next day.
Of course there should be no lapse in time for the search to begin for a missing human being, but the fact that there are no mothers, fathers, siblings, friends or lovers raising the alarm over the disappearances of these women is heartbreaking.
As if anyone needed further proof that the Downtown Eastside is a cesspool. Goddess forgive us.
A group called the Society for the Advancement of Marginalized Persons has begun a new initiative. The Self-Monitoring Program registers women who are considered at-risk, have those women fill out a missing persons report, have their photographs taken, and have the women provide a lock of hair to provide a DNA sample. Then the women are contracted to call in several times daily to let organizers know they are alive and well, or at least alive. Any and all women who feel they fit the profile of potential victim are encouraged to register.
All to provide these women with some reassurance that, in the event that they go missing, someone will actually notice and take steps to find them.
This is one of the saddest projects about which I have ever heard.
It is absolutely appalling that some women are so totally dehumanized that they have come to accept the fact that the only people who can and will look out for them are themselves. The disappearances of sixty-three women from the little piece of hell these women call home proved to them that they are on their own.
Every person with an IQ in the double digits knows that Robert Pickton did not act alone in the serial murders of the 23 women he stands accused of killing. The man hasn't got the brains God gave a turnip, he had help with this atrocity, or he was the "help". That means the women of the Downtown Eastside are still vulnerable, not only to the daily violence that is part of their reality, but to the threat of horrible, senseless death at the hands of a monster.
That these women are forced to check in with strangers in order to get searchers out looking for them in the event of a disappearance is monumentally tragic. If a women is "reliable" with her call-ins, a search will be launched the evening of her disappearance (after the final call-in time has lapsed). If a woman has proven herself to be "unreliable", the search will not begin until the next day.
Of course there should be no lapse in time for the search to begin for a missing human being, but the fact that there are no mothers, fathers, siblings, friends or lovers raising the alarm over the disappearances of these women is heartbreaking.
As if anyone needed further proof that the Downtown Eastside is a cesspool. Goddess forgive us.
posted by Alphamutt at 11:32 PM
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