In fact, they were very young girls really, if I saw them standing in the street, my instinct would be to get them home safely.
But long before they were prostitutes, they were a father’s daughter, a mother’s best friend, loved and cherished by a circle of family and friends. Even as they were prostitutes, they were human beings, and there was something about their lives that defined them much more than the tag “prostitute”. You cannot define their existence by what they were doing as they died. If a man dies of a heart attack while masturbating, do his obituaries headline, “Joe Bloggs, Masturbater” ?
I don’t see the big deal. They’re just letting you know the information. This isn’t an obituary its a news story and the fact that they were prostitutes, takes away some mystery about why these two girls were killed, what with prostitutes being murder victims of serial killers and such not uncommon.
They weren’t women, they were humans… Of course the fact that they were human, or female, probably doesn’t specify the main reason they were killed. If the serial killer targeted bank tellers, and the article called them “tellers” rather than women, would you still be outraged?
I don’t think you get my point. I don’t dispute they were prostitutes :- my beef is with the reporting of their death.
For example, I know for a fact that an Irish cabinet minister,who died within the past 5 years, actually died in an S+M dungeon, dressed in female lingerie, with the cause of death being a heart attack induced by the excitement of being buggered by an extra large dildo.
Search all over the internet, search every online news source you can find, you won’t find his name. The news sources who knew about it (which included Sky News, the BBC, RTE,the Irish Times, the Irish Independent and the Irish Examiner), created a veil of absolute secrecy, to protect his family. All I ask is the same sensitivity be shown to these girls’s families. Write a report of a 19 year old girl’s murder like you were her father.
Unfortunately, and with the potential for great inaccuracy, some of the reports have not even described them as ‘women’ at all, just as ‘prostitutes’.
Others state that something along the lines of, ’ the body of a prostitute was found in a stream not far from where another was discovered six weeks ago’
They hardly even acknowledge the fact that either were human at all.
This Sky report is not the worst example at all, its the accumultaion of these rubbish reports that is galling, if you read that report in isolation, you don’t get the feel of the way this is being reported, but as you can imagine, over here there are quite a lot of reports from different sources and it builds into an unedifying picture.
The OP is quite right, the lack of sensitivity is appalling.
It wasn’t a stream, it was a drainage ditch. Also, they were all barefoot, and placed at the location in similar poses. There is a theory that the serial killer is a foot fetishist.
I’m with the OP. The story is local to me, and so we’ve been bombarded by an excited media for whom it’s the biggest story of the year. Much of it either has overtones of prurient fascination with the women’s lives, or a moralistic “they had it coming” attituded normally reserved for drug dealers. (The latter tends to feature the astonishingly-old fashioned ‘vice girl’ tag.)
Yes, of course it’s likely that their deaths are directly related to the fact they worked as prostitutes. But it doesn’t need to be integral to every headline.
It could be worse. A pig farm in BC was found to contain the remains of at least twenty-seven women, most of them prostitutes, some of whom had been missing for years. As they were prostitutes and therefore “expected” to disappear, essentially nobody except the sex work community had paid attention when they vanished. Now, the owner of the farm’s on trial for their murders.
You are speaking of Robert Pickton. They don’t have to be prostitutes to be ignored. Look at Juarez Mexico as an example. I do believe they made an arrest some months ago in Colorado in connection with some of the disapperances though. Yes, in searching I found the topic at the other message board about it. There was an arrest made in August, but apparently no further news about it. That still leaves a LOT of unsolved deaths and vanishings in Juarez though.
You want the media to withhold the fact that they were prostitutes, sparing the sensitivities of the families, but at the same time possibly endangering other prostitutes who might not have been aware of the killer’s choice of victim but for the media blitz?
The coverage of the other case (that I mistakenly thought the OP was talking about) is much more senstive. Word is still getting out, without headlines that scream out prostitutes murdered!
In my community, if a teacher or professor or school administrator or police officer or firefighter or city council member or restaurant owner or other small business owner was killed, the profession would likely be in the headline or lede, even if the person wasn’t killed doing his or her job.
“Local police chief Joe Smith died Saturday of an apparent heart attack at his home.”
“Izzi’s Pizza owner Sam Johnson died Friday after a van crossed the center line of Route 51 and hit the truck Johnson was driving.”
“Riverton High teacher found dead in woods”
etc.
I don’t particularly see anything wrong with that.