Over the past decade, street sex workers and their families garnered considerable media attention through extensive coverage of disappeared and murdered women in Western Canada. The research presented here examines whether recent media accounts differ from past coverage given that families and friends of disappeared and unaccounted for women inserted themselves into media discussions and circulated alternative readings of their stories. We found that coverage was dominated by two discourses: Vermin-victim discourse demonstrates the tensions between historically dominant conceptualizations and more recent ideas promulgated by families; and risky lifestyle discourse is related to neo-liberal ideologies about personal choice and responsibility.
BradleyK. (2007, January23). Calgary man related to victim upset by coverage. Calgary Herald, p. A.4.
8.
BramhamD. (2008, March1). Danielle LaRue never had chance to succeed: A childhood full of pain and abuse led her to drug addiction, working the streets and an unsolved death—A fate that’s been all too common among First Nations children in the city. Vancouver Sun, p. C.1.
CarterS. (1997). Capturing women: The manipulation of cultural imagery in Canada’s prairie West. Montréal, Quebec, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
11.
ComackE.SeshiaM. (2010). Bad dates and street hassles: Violence in the Winnipeg street sex trade. Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 52, 203-214.
12.
CookS. A. (1997). “Do not . . . do anything that you cannot unblushingly tell your mother”: Gender and social purity in Canada. Histoire Sociale/Social History, 30, 215-238.
13.
CorbellaL. (2007, December15). Sometimes, jail can prove to be someone’s salvation. Calgary Herald, p. A.32.
14.
CormierR. (2007, January3). Street family pulled at mother of two. Edmonton Journal, p. A.3.
15.
CulbertL. (2006a, January28). A marathon of misery. Edmonton Journal, p. A.17.
16.
CulbertL. (2006b, December4). Missing woman found alive. Vancouver Sun, p. B.1.
17.
CulbertL. (2007, January12). Never to be forgotten. Vancouver Sun, p. A4
18.
CulbertL. (2008, February26). Nothing’s changed. Vancouver Sun, p. B.1.
19.
DallaR. (2002). Night moves: A qualitative investigation of street-level sex work. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 26, 63-73.
20.
DallaR.XiaY.KennedyH. (2003). “You just give them what they want and pray they don’t kill you”: Street-level sex workers’ reports of victimization, personal resources, and coping strategies. Violence Against Women, 9, 1367-1394.
21.
DeanA. R. (2009). Hauntings: Representations of Vancouver’s disappeared women (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Alberta, British Columbia, Canada.
22.
DoezemaJ. (2001). Ouch!: Western feminists’ “wounded attachment” to the “third world prostitute.”Feminist Review, 67, 16-38.
23.
FaircloughN. (1992). Discourse and text: Linguistic and intertextual analysis within discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 3, 193-217.
24.
FaircloughN. (1993). Discourse and social change. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
25.
FaircloughN. (1996). Technologisation of discourse. In Caldas-CoulthardC. R.CoulthardM. (Eds.), Texts and practices: Readings in critical discourse analysis (pp. 71-83). London, England: Routledge.
26.
FarleyM.LynneJ.CottonA. J. (2005). Prostitution in Vancouver: Violence and the colonization of first nations women. Transcultural Psychiatry, 42, 242-271.
27.
FiskeJ. (1995). Political status of Native Indian women: Contradictory implications of Canadian state policy. American Indian Cultural and Research Journal, 19(2), 1-30.
28.
FoucaultM. (1981). The order of discourse. In YoungR. (Ed.), Untying the text: A post-structural anthology (pp. 48-78). Boston, MA: Routledge.
29.
FoucaultM. (2000). The subject and power. In FaubionJ. D. (Ed.), Power: The essential works of Foucault (pp. 326-348). New York: Free Press.
30.
GolderS.LoganT. (2007). Correlates and predictors of women’s sex trading over time among a sample of out-of-treatment drug abusers. AIDS and Behavior, 11, 628-640.
31.
GoughV.TalbotM. (1996). “Guilt over games boys play”: Coherence as a focus for examining the constitution of heterosexual subjectivity on a problem page. In Caldas-CoulthardC. R.CoulthardM. (Eds.), Texts and practices: Readings in critical discourse analysis (pp. 214-230). London, England: Routledge.
32.
GreenJ. (2001). Canaries in the mines of citizenship: Indian women in Canada. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 34, 715-738.
33.
GrekulJ. (2008). Sterilization in Alberta, 1928 to 1972: Gender matters. Canadian Review of Sociology, 45, 247-266.
34.
HallgrimsdottirH. K.PhillipsR.BenoitC.WalbyK. (2008). Sporting girls, streetwalkers, and inmates of houses of ill repute: Media narratives and the historical mutability of prostitution stigmas. Sociological Perspectives, 51, 119-138.
35.
HardingR. (2006). Historical representations of Aboriginal people in the Canadian news media. Discourse & Society, 17, 205-235.
36.
HoweA. (2008). Sex, violence and crime: Foucault and the “man” question. New York: Routledge-Cavendish.
37.
JiwaniY.YoungM. L. (2006). Missing and murdered women: Reproducing marginality in news discourse. Canadian Journal of Communication, 31, 895-917.
38.
KantolaJ.SquiresJ. (2004). Discourses surrounding prostitution policy in the UK. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 11, 77-101.
39.
KerkinK. (2004). Discourse, representation and urban planning: How a critical approach to discourse helps reveal the spatial re-ordering of street sex work. Australian Geographer, 35, 185-192.
40.
KovachM. (2005). Emerging from the margins: Indigenous methodologies. In BrownL.StregaS. (Eds.), Research as resistance: Critical, indigenous and anti-oppressive approaches (pp. 19-36). Toronto, Ontario: Canadian Scholars Press.
41.
KramerL.BergE. (2003). A survival analysis of timing of entry into prostitution: The differential impact of race, educational level, and childhood/adolescent risk factors. Sociological Inquiry, 73, 511-528.
42.
LadnerK. (2009). Gendering decolonisation, decolonising gender. Australian Indigenous Law Review, 13, 62-77.
43.
LowmanJ. (2000). Violence and the outlaw status of (street) prostitution in Canada. Violence Against Women, 6, 987-1011.
44.
LowmanJ. (2005). Submission to the subcommittee on solicitation laws of the standing committee on justice, human rights, public safety and emergency preparedness. Retrieved from http://mypage.uniserve.ca/~lowman/
45.
McNaughtonC.SandersT. (2007). Housing and transitional phases out of “disordered” lives: The case of leaving homelessness and street sex work. Housing Studies, 22, 885-900.
46.
Mona LeeW. (2007, December10). Vancouver Sun, p. A.6.
Ndaawin. (n.d.). Protecting children information guide: Preventing the sexual exploitation of children and youth through prostitution. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: Author.
49.
NixonK.TuttyL.DowneP.GorkoffK.UrselJ. (2002). The everyday occurrence: Violence in the lives of girls exploited through prostitution. Violence Against Women, 8, 1016-1043.
50.
O’DohertyT. (2011). Victimization in off-street sex industry work. Violence Against Women, 17, 944-963.
51.
PACE Society. (2000). Violence against women in Vancouver’s street level sex trade and the police response. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: Author.
52.
PlumridgeL. (2001). Rhetoric, reality and risk outcomes in sex work. Health, Risk & Society, 3, 199-215.
53.
PrattG. (2005). Abandoned women and spaces of the exception. Antipode, 37, 1052-1078.
54.
RazackS. (2000). Gendered racial violence and spatialized justice: The murder of Pamela George. Canadian Journal of Law & Society, 15, 91-130.
55.
RazackS. (2002). Gendered racial violence and spatialized justice: The murder of Pamela George. In RazackS. (Ed.), Race, space and the law: Unmapping a white settler society (pp. 121-156). Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Between the Lines Press.
SmartC. (1999). A history of ambivalence and conflict in the discursive construction of the “child victim” of sexual abuse. Social & Legal Studies, 8, 391-409.
65.
SmithA. (2005). Conquest: Sexual violence and American Indian genocide. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
66.
Statistics Canada. (2006). Aboriginal population profile. Available from www.statcan.gc.ca
67.
StolerA. L. (1997). Making empire respectable: The politics of race and sexual morality in twentieth century colonial cultures. In LamphereL.RagoneH.ZavellaP. (Eds.), Situated lives, gender and culture in everyday life (pp. 373-399). London, England: Routledge.
68.
SutherlandK. (2004). Work, sex, and sex-work: Competing feminist discourses on the international sex trade. Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 42, 139-167.
69.
SuthersL. (2008, January). Trial puts spotlight on women. Alberta Sweetgrass, pp. 2-7.
70.
TebrakeR. (2009, June15). Sex workers lose all-night support system; Provincial government failed to renew funding for van carrying clean needles, condoms. Vancouver Sun, p. A.5.
71.
Valandra. (2007). Reclaiming their lives and breaking free: An afrocentric approach to recovery from prostitution. Affilia, 22, 195-208.
72.
Van BrunschotE. G.SydieR.KrullC. (1999). Images of prostitution. Women & Criminal Justice, 10(4), 47-72.
73.
Vancouver Sun (2007, December10). Marnie Frey, p. A4
74.
van DijkT. A. (1989). Structures of discourse and structures of power. In AndersonJ. A. (Ed.), Communication yearbook 12 (pp. 18-59). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
75.
van DijkT. A. (1996). Discourse, power and access. In Caldas-CoulthardC. R.CoulthardM. (Eds.), Texts and practices: Readings in critical discourse analysis (pp. 85-104). London, England: Routledge.
76.
VoyageurC. (2011). Female first nations chiefs and the colonial legacy in Canada. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 35(3), 59-78.
77.
WahabS. (2004). Tricks of the trade: What social workers can learn about female sex workers through dialogue. Qualitative Social Work, 3, 139-160.
78.
ZickefooseS. (2007, December6). Family members anxiously await Pickton jury; courthouse vigil tension-filled. Calgary Herald, p. A.13.
