Verdict after Gladue’s death sends painful message about whose lives are valued

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This article was published 25/03/2015 (4166 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Warning: This column contains content that may be disturbing to some readers.

 

Do you know who Cindy Gladue is?

If you followed the disturbing trial of Bradley Barton, then it’s likely you only know Gladue’s name, and perhaps the horrific details about how she died. You might know she was indigenous, that she was 36 years old and that she worked in Edmonton’s sex trade. You might know she bled to death in a bathtub at the Yellowhead Inn in 2011. Her death was treated as a homicide.

Last week, Barton, who was charged with first-degree murder, walked away a free man after a jury found him not guilty. The defence argued the fatal 11-centimetre wound in Gladue’s vagina was the accidental result of “rough sex” and not, as the Crown prosector argued, the result of an intentional stabbing. Gladue’s blood-alcohol limit was four times the legal limit, which means she couldn’t legally consent to sex — rough or otherwise. Medical experts were divided on whether the wound could have been caused by a sharp object or tearing from sex.

The Edmonton Journal reported Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Robert Graesser told the jury last Tuesday they could convict Barton of first-degree murder or manslaughter, or acquit him. The jury chose to acquit him.

There is no justice for Cindy Gladue in this stunning decision, who was so much more than what the month-long and incredibly re-victimizing trial reduced her to. She was someone with hopes and dreams and fears. She was someone with a family. She was someone. Gladue and her family have been in my thoughts since the verdict was handed down. It’s impossible to imagine what they’re going through.

This story hits home because it’s too familiar. “Sex worker found dead in bathtub” is a headline we’ve read too many times, in too many iterations. It’s not always a bathtub. Sometimes it’s a ravine. Or a river. Or sometimes, as in the case of 25-year-old Winnipegger Carolyn Marie Sinclair, it’s a trash receptacle. Too many women, indigenous women, have been tossed out like garbage.

Indeed, sex workers face a disproportionate amount of violence — violence they are often blamed for by people who believe bad things happen to bad girls. The myth a sex worker “can’t be raped” remains a persistent one. But sexual assault should not “come with the territory.” Like anyone else, sex workers have bodily autonomy. They must consent.

Cindy Gladue couldn’t have consented — and it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which she would consent to a sex act so violent. How “rough” does sex have to be for someone to bleed out?

In the courtroom, Gladue was literally reduced to her body parts when her preserved vagina was presented as evidence — a unprecedented move Alberta’s chief examiner said was necessary to understand the dispute over her “unusual” injury. An unprecedented move that, no matter how one attempts to justify it, is a gross violation of the victim. As Canadian writer Karen Connelly powerfully wrote on her blog, “So, here you go Canada, the vagina was on trial. An indigenous sex worker’s vagina was on trial. Not the white man who violated it. The indigenous body was judged guilty, obviously, sentenced to more abuse, more degradation, more injustice.”

The not-guilty verdict shocked and sickened many people on social media who were holding out hope for a different outcome. This ruling hurts, because it sends yet another painful message about whose lives are valued in this country.

A few writers, including Connelly, are urging people to put their outrage on paper and write letters to Crown prosecutor Carole Godfrey, asking for an appeal for a retrial.

Because right now, as it stands, there is no justice for Cindy Gladue. And there never will be unless we raise our voices.

 

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca