Indigenous women in Canada have always been vulnerable, but there’s a stretch of remote road that’s such a hotspot for disappearances, assaults, and murders of women that it’s been called the Highway of Tears. And not much has been done to change that.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know. The man, this is a bummer edition.
Yeah, the Zero Laughs edition, because we're talking about the Highway of Tears. And there's no other way around it. This is just a devastating topic.
Yeah, we should tell people. I mean, the Highway of Tears is fairly famous. It's kind of been in the news and in pop culture, I guess, for a while. I guess at least since the 90s, but really in the early 2000s, I think, is when it picked up. Regardless, it is a stretch of desolate highway that runs in British Columbia, up in Canada, from the port city of Prince Rupert,
All the way into the interior to Prince George. And it's, I think, 720 kilometers, almost 450 miles. And it's known as Highway 16 officially. But the stretches of this highway are so desolate. so remote and so sparsely populated that it has become a haven for murderers who pick people up, mostly women, mostly indigenous women, on this road and either make them disappear forever or murder them.
And it's endemic in this area so much so that it's caught national attention just how poorly this group of women are being treated and their families as well.
Yeah, it's, you know, as you'll see, it's and, you know, there are many reasons for this, but it's a heavily hitchhiked road and that can be very dangerous. And so a lot of times these are hitchhikers, people just trying to get from one place to another. And like you said, they are, you know, either sexually assaulted or murdered or both.
And these are the people that, you know, like they found bodies. There are, you know, dozens and dozens more than these dozens who have survived attacks and rapes along that stretch of highway. So, you know, it's no secret why it's called the Highway of Tears. Big thanks to Livia for enduring this topic and helping us out with it.
And big thanks to Al Jazeera, where she got a lot of information from a six-part series they did in 2021.
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