There are between seven and eight hundred men in Seattle who live from the revenue from the “white slave traffic”, almost all of whom could be reached by the State Courts, if proper efforts were made. It was established by the Grand Jury that the Federal Government has gone as far as the law allows. It is now up to the State authorities, who could break up this business in short order.
What are We Going to Do About the Children?
A Group of Children in the Midst of the “Red Light” District
Levee women, women living in prostitution, “madams,” etc., do not bring up their children (and most of Chicago’s female dealers in prostitution have several of them) in or near segregated districts of vice. Like the saloon keeper who moved to Evanston to get his children away from the harmful, degenerating influences of the saloon and its environing neighborhoods, so the “madam,” that active principal in the slavedom of the girls of our Land, in almost every case sees to it that her children are well brought up, away from the influences and knowledge of prostitution, while her agents and keepers are out scouring the department stores, factories, villages and country homes for girls to fill the sickening, festering, shrieking ranks of the great death army of publicly protected White Slaves.
The writer has investigated many cases, and in every instance has found the children of these vultures of girlhood in exclusive colleges or military schools, being excellently prepared to take decent positions in business and social life. Case after case has recently come to light of women supporting their children on the fashionable avenues, in Harvard and military colleges, while they themselves with hearts of hell, wring the dollars that pay for these luxuries from the bleeding, broken bodies of a gang of Levee White Slaves—your sister and mine—younger than her own, better born, better raised, but lost forever in the crushing, barred and screened gehenna of modern harlotry.
Sixty-nine per cent of the children raised in the vast slum neighborhoods surrounding the segregated districts of prostitution are ruined before reaching the age of eighteen. This dreadful, appalling feature has been recently brought to light through close investigation by the writer and her co-workers, together with the sickening fact that little girls scarcely more than babies, are being constantly sought, secured and sacrificed to satisfy the cravings of abnormal, degenerate vice and debauchery abounding in every large city. These little children, painted and showily dressed, are fast making their appearance in such cities as New York and Chicago, and they are the forerunners of Oriental child debauchery. These little girls are seldom seen on the streets, but may be recognized when seen, by their deformed, bowed legs, bent backs and shrivelled little, old faces—such faces as we find in cripples aged by pain. Our hearts have been almost stilled as we have listened to the terrible stories of the hundreds of little girls in the ghastly fleshmarkets of India and China who, by the knife and the insertion into their tender bodies of wedges of expanding wood, are thus made ready, through months of torture, for the use of some inhuman Hindu or Chinese monster who for the sum of a few dollars purchases the use of their shrieking, quivering bodies, to leave them after a day or two of unparalleled debauchery, dead, or if still living, then with broken back or limbs, a human sacrifice indeed.
We have read and known all this and wished that we could die that these children might be saved—but listen, do we realize that with the influx into our midst, into our larger cities, of the vilest, most degenerate men and women on earth, thousands upon thousands of the most hellish brutes of Asia and China—men who reckon girlhood lower than the female dog, has come this very thing—this reeking, diabolical crime against innocent girlhood. Two especially revolting cases have come under the direct notice of the writer, yet without sufficient legal proof to face in court the organized, thoroughly financed hand of men and women exploiting these dreadful conditions: one, a girl Louise, on Custom House Place; the other, Rosie from the 22nd Street environments. The last named, cut, torn and bleeding, made a statement to the writer that cannot be put in print; yet she was by her owners accused of masturbation. Both of these girls were under ten years of age.