PREVENTIVE, REFORMATIVE, AND CORRECTIONAL AGENCIES IN NEW YORK CITY
The agencies working to meet the need of wayward and professional delinquent women and girls in New York City are both private and public, direct and indirect. Work in this field can rarely be strictly characterized as either preventive, reformative or correctional. Almost all the agencies in question do both a preventive and a reformative work, though, in the main, the tendency toward preventive work is stronger than that toward rescue work. The following account is not exhaustive, but aims to deal with the representative institutions in each field.
(a) THE WORK OF PREVENTION
Preventive agencies cover a very wide range, beginning of course with the home and family, the school and the church; but important as these and similar institutions are, they are too general to come within the scope of this chapter. There are, however, certain societies and institutions which exert a potent though indirect influence,—among them the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Society for the Prevention of Crime and the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. A few institutions render more direct service,—the Association for Befriending Children and Young Girls and the Children’s Aid Society, for example. These, with the Home for the Friendless, the Sheltering Arms, the girls’ departments of the Catholic Protectorate, the Juvenile Asylum, and other organizations maintain homes for the young. There are, moreover, numerous settlements with a hold on the young through kindergartens, clubs, and friendly services, doing a quiet but constantly effective preventive work; independent girls’ clubs, thirty special ones in New York, providing opportunities for friendship, recreation and training; some societies, such as the Girls’ Friendly, offering attractions to girls who have few advantages in their homes. The work of the Committee on Amusements and Vacation Resources of Working Girls has been active in the difficult dance hall problem, previously shown to be an important factor in the exploitation of prostitution. The Travelers’ Aid Society, which assists incoming women of all classes at railway stations and docks, is a valuable safeguard. This society definitely helped 18,562 persons in the year 1912. Of these, 5,161 were from seventeen to twenty-five years of age, and nearly all women. Similar work for traveling colored girls is done by a department of the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes. The Big Sisters assist girls who have already come to the point of grave danger. Working along the lines already marked out by the Big Brothers’ Movement, women of devoted abilities are taking little girls who have already yielded to temptation and endeavoring to win them to useful lives.
Homes for working girls and women, though touching this need indirectly, touch it strongly. There are many of these homes, maintained by philanthropic and religious boards of women; seventeen hundred women are accommodated in them. Their economic value has long been realized; their moral and social importance is beginning to be appreciated. Their usefulness as preventive agencies probably varies with the degree of experience, resourcefulness, and sympathy possessed by those who are directly in charge.
Among the more definitely preventive agencies may be mentioned, first, societies of a national scope which aim to create healthy sentiment by emphasizing the grave dangers of the social evil. Such are the American Federation of Sex Hygiene and the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, operating through meetings, lectures and printed matter; the American Vigilance Association, which, originally organized to secure legislation and law enforcement as respects the white slave traffic, has now extended its operations so that it is actively engaged in a propaganda that touches the entire field of commercialized vice; it publishes a monthly periodical, Vigilance.
Prominent among local organizations is the Committee of Fourteen, originally organized for the suppression of the Raines Law Hotels, now occupied in combating all manifestations of commercialized sexual vice in New York. It endeavors to secure more vigorous and effective action by all departments of state and city government having power to suppress vice; and it also strives to improve conditions in saloons and hotels through the influence and control over such places exercised by brewers and surety companies.