THE LOSS OF HUMANITY

Women paying the price in DTES

The graphic video was shot in the full light of day on a sidewalk in the so-called heart of Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside.

A bare-chested man appears to be raping an unresponsive woman at the busy corner of Main and Hastings streets. From the waist down, he is covered by a blanket, or perhaps, a sleeping bag.

At one point, she stirs and brings her hand to her forehead. With her face mostly obscured, it isn't clear whether she is stoned, drunk, or has simply given up. Her leg dangles awkwardly by his shoulder before he loops an arm under it, pulling skyward so that the high heel of the tall black boot points straight up.

It's horrific. Distressing in so many ways.

Three guys in the video's foreground made some rude observations. Mostly they just stood there, not really watching, but also not completely ignoring what was happening.

Another cluster of men stood on the other side. A bus rumbled by. People walked past, faces turned away. Nobody stopped.

But somebody recorded it and posted it to Facebook, where the comments were more crude than outraged.

When the video was shot isn't clear. But the bystanders were wearing coats, and the ACCESS banners hanging off a former bank building now filled with social services agencies are still there.

Patrol officers and the Vancouver Police Department's sex crimes unit are now investigating.

They received a copy of the video the same day that I did.

Mayor Kennedy Stewart learned of it from me, and in a one-sentence emailed statement, said he had contacted police Chief Adam Palmer and that an investigation is underway.

On Vancouver's drug-addled Downtown Eastside, chaos and depravity have become so normalized that there's no humanity left.

This video is just the latest proof.

Late last week, a sex worker called the bad date line operated by WISH, a drop-in centre for sex workers. She had heard a woman screaming in a car. Other people were on the street and would have heard it, as well. Nobody did anything except for that lone woman, who got a partial licence plate number as the car sped off.

Outside the street market in September, a woman died. It was two hours before anyone noticed, according to a report by Vancouverisawesome.com.

Throughout the spring, there were reports of women being held hostage, raped, brutalized and even shot in the now-disbanded homeless camp at Oppenheimer Park.

No witnesses came forward. Only victims.

In April, people complained about the door to a portable toilet outside the busy Carnegie Centre at Main and Hastings being closed for hours. Apparently, nobody heard a woman in labour, or saw her leave. Later that day, police found the dead baby's body.

“This is not the story of a woman who failed, but about a woman who was failed,” Janice Abbott, CEO of Atira Women's Resource Society, tweeted at the time.

But in January, Tanya Hyer was fatally beaten in the Gastown Hotel run by Atira, which is the largest non-profit housing provider in the Downtown Eastside.

Eleven months later, Hyer's murderer still hasn't been found. Again, nobody appears to have heard or seen anything.

Let's not forget, these are the same streets where serial killer Willie Pickton trolled for his 49 victims in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Yet there has long been a romanticized notion that the Downtown Eastside community knit tightly together by shared poverty, trauma, addictions and sorrow is still one where people are able to rise above it and care for each other.

“I know it's not popular to say, but if it ever was that way, I don't think it's the case anymore,” said Mabret Beyene, the executive director of WISH Drop-In Centre. “So many people have died that it has left a whole new level of desperation, and there are new people constantly coming in.

“Whatever the Downtown Eastside once was, it's shifted.”

What it is now — Canada's poorest postal code, the centre of this country's illicit drug overdose epidemic, a beacon of shame in a homelessness crisis — is beyond shameful.

Block for block, this neighbourhood has the highest density of social service agencies in the province, and possibly Canada. Even before the opioid overdose crisis took root or COVID arrived, governments were pouring more than $1 million into it every day.

What happens every day and night is a stunning rebuke to the collision of social and economic policies that have led to this.

And no one has paid a higher price than the women who find themselves there with nowhere else to go.