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- Paperback ISBN: 9781552663776
- Paperback Price: $17.95 CAD
- Publication Date: Sep 2010
- Rights: World
- Pages: 112
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Request Examination CopyMissing Women, Missing News
Covering Crisis in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
David Hugill
Missing Women, Missing News examines newspaper coverage of the arrest and trial of Robert Pickton, the man charged with murdering 26 street-level sex workers from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It demonstrates how news narratives obscured the complex matrix of social and political conditions that made it possible for so many women to simply ‘disappear’ from a densely populated urban neighborhood without provoking an aggressive response by the state. Grounded in a theory of ideology, this book argues that the coverage offers a series of coherent explanations that hold particular individuals and practices accountable but largely omit, conceal, or erase the broader socio‐political context that renders those practices possible.
Contents
Introduction: “Once we became aware” • Defining the Boundaries of the Crisis • Absolving the State; Producing the Prostitute • Producing Skid Row • Conclusions: Beyond the Benevolence of the State • References
About the Author
David Hugill is a Ph.D. student in Human Geography at York University. He is also an editor of Upping the Anti.
Excerpt
Reviews
Review in Herizons Magazine, Winter 2011
In 2007, the missing and murdered women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside made regular front-page headlines as Robert Pickton went to trial for 27 counts of first degree murder. Four years later, David Hugill’s landmark book Missing Women, Missing News: Covering Crisis in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside reignites the story.
In his intellectually challenging and astonishingly thought provoking book, Hugill provides a rich analysis of how Canadian print media failed to provide sufficient coverage of the crisis. Drawing on the news stories, headlines and photographs of more than 150 artilcles from the Globe and Mail, National Post and Toronto Star, Hugill argues that mainstream news coverage reduced the murders and disappearances of 60 Vancouver women, most of whom were Aboriginal, to a series of random events.
The media’s focus on the apparently random nature of the crimes, according to Hugill, created a story in which Pickton and police negligence were the sole factors responsible for the serial killings. Hugill argues that the media ignored the broader and more complex ways in which the state also played a central role in the crisis.
He traces the connections between federal laws on prostitution, the treatment of Aboriginal people under the Indian Act and Vancouver’s weakened social welfare system in order to demonstrate the state’s involvement in the crisis. Hugill boldly argues that until there is a serious dialogue about the Canadian state’s active role in marginalizing specific gendered and racialized bodies, low-income women will remain vulnerable to peripheral street-level sex work, poverty and murder.
Missing Women, Missing News will sharpen your analytical skills as they relate to news stories. It will also become a core text in interdisciplinary undergraduate courses that focus on gender and the neo-liberal city.- Katie Palmer, Herizons, Summer 2011.
MediaINDEGINA Interviews David Hugill
MediaINDEGINA Radio spoke with David Hugill about his book, Missing Women, Missing News. Listen here.