Agents are continually at work obtaining young girls, the prisoner said. The slave sellers do not want hardened women, he explained; they want pretty, immature girls. The agents are generally well dressed women who ingratiate themselves with their childish victims at matinees and moving-picture shows, and by dining them and painting rosy pictures of a life of ease, win them away from their homes or their ill-paid positions.
“When there is a call for girls,” Levenson continued, “the buyer hands over the money paid for them to the keeper. Then an agent—these are usually men—take the girls to wherever the “order” comes from. These agents then collect 10 per cent of the girl’s weekly earnings.”
Quoting from the National Prohibitionist, May 12:
THE SLAVE TRADE AND THE VOTER
The Christian voter who reads, and reads with blood boiling, as the blood of every honest man must, the shameful story of the exposure of the traffic in girls especially in New York, must not allow his imagination to run away with his reasoning faculties.
Awful as the story is, we invite attention, not to its horror—the horror of herds of little girls sold at a per-head price below the value of pigs—but to the practical questions of responsibility and cure.
Why does this infamy exist in our cities?
How can it exist?
Who is responsible?
The answers all come to one point—the governments that rule our cities.