Missing Sarah: A Vancouver Woman Remembers Her Vanished Sister

Christine Schmidt specializes in law and sociology at Laurentian
University.

Prostitutes, sex-workers, lost women, the “missing women” of
Vancouver are among the terms that were used to characterize the women
who had mysteriously vanished from the streets of Vancouver over the
past decade. After police started to search a farm in Port Coquitlam,
however, these women became known simply as murdered sex-workers,
murdered prostitutes, and the like. Written by the sister of one of
those women, Missing Sarah is a powerful counterbalance to the tendency
of the media to focus on murders (the more sordid the better) and those
who commit them while ignoring the grievous loss of the victims.

Missing Sarah documents the rich life, from infancy to adulthood, of
one of the women whose DNA was found at the farm in Vancouver. The book
is not an attempt to justify prostitution. Instead it is an attempt to
reclaim the dignity of one woman by documenting the whole person, not
just the sex-work or the murder. One of the sad truths about murder is
that the victims often become lost while the murderer stays etched on
the minds of the public for years; in this moving and engagingly written
book, Maggie de Vries triumphantly reverses that equation.