It has been said by investigators that 20 per cent voluntarily enter such a life, and that 80 per cent are led into it or are entrapped and sold. A small per cent of these are from foreign countries, but two-thirds of them are from our country and largely from farms and smaller towns and cities.
This systematic traffic in girls from American homes is carried on by male parasites, who live lives of luxury from their gains from this work as procurers and panderers. Women are also used to beguile other women for the trade.
These infamous creatures sometimes go as agents for books, gramophones, or machines. A woman now in the penitentiary said she canvassed communities to sell toilet articles, for the purpose of finding girls.
Victims are looked for in railroad depots, and trains are watched for young women traveling alone.
General deliveries in post offices are watched where young women call for letters.
Recruiting stations are found in dance halls, in the cities and amusements parks with drinking places as attachments. Ice cream parlors and fruit stores sometimes serve as spiders' webs for entanglement.
The villainous men engaged in this work assume the guise of friends and sometimes will even talk to parents about getting fine positions for their girls. They are promised places in stores and laundries and in a number of cases theatrical positions, with large pay. Sometimes the procurer professes to have fallen in love and marries his victim and then sells her in the market. Several of the runaway marriages on the boat excursions and at summer resorts have been shown in the courts as of this fraudulent order.
After girls are caught in the net and drawn into a vile resort various plans are made to complete their ruin and hold them in absolute bondage. Their street clothes are taken away, they are not allowed to write letters to their friends, and some are confined under lock and key.
Their owners keep them in debt for clothes, charged for at exorbitant prices, their wages are often paid to the parasite who has claims upon them and often these ties of debt and vice so fasten the bonds of slavery that they become broken and desperate. All of these things and many more unprintable details of these cases have been made matter of court record and show that this systematic traffic in American girls is not a fiction.
To show the tremendous financial gains of the traffic, one couple gave a bond of $26,500 and immediately ran away and forfeited their bond.