The Highway of Tears
Highway of Tears (definition from wikipedia.com):
An unsolved series of murders and disappearances of young women in the vicinity of Highway 16 has earned the route the nickname the “Highway of Tears”. Since 1988, at least 32 women, 31 of them aboriginal, have been killed or have suspiciously disappeared along the 800-kilometre (500-mile) section of highway between Prince George to Prince Rupert. These crimes have remained largely uninvestigated.
As the result of a symposium held in Prince George in March 2006, aboriginal Canadians along the route are advocating better rural bus service that would help reduce the number of young native women hitchhiking. In addition, spurred on by native leaders, the RCMP is officially investigating the unsolved murder or disappearance of nine women between the ages of 14 and 25 since 1974, most of whom were hitchhiking along Highway 16.
With so many missing women you would think that the RCMP would have started looking for information about the mysterious disaperances along time ago. It took many rallies, fights and determined family members to make the police realize that maybe these weren’t just “missing” people. Maybe there were actually some murderers out there preying on these poor, innocent women. The mass majority of the missing women are of aboriginal decent. Which brings up another point, maybe the reason these cases weren’t looked into more is because of the ethnic backgrounds of the victims? Why should they be any less important than any other ethnicity? Many others believe that the women who went missing were “working the streets” at the time of their dissaperances. This still doesn’t make it right for the RCMP to put them on the back burner. They are all humans like us, just have made a few bad decisions in their lives. I heard about the highway of tears, not through the news but through a friend a few years ago. She had been doing a project on murders in BC like the Robert Picton trial and a website came up, http://www.highwayoftears.ca/. It was made by the families of the missing woman. I found it very interesting that our news didn’t say anything about these missing women. Maybe because they didn’t know or maybe for the simple reason that these young girls were aboriginal and possible prostitutes.
I say, what does it matter if we have different skin colours, or have different morals of what is right and whats wrong, every person should have the chance to be treated as an equal. I know that if it were me who had gone missing, I would expect that my local authorities along with my community would do whatever they possibly could to find me!
