Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade

by Unknown

The recent splendid immigration laws which have been passed by the United States, protecting immigrant girls until they have been in this country three years, has been the law under which most of the cases of white slave traffic have been prosecuted. The records of the Federal courts, wherever the authorities have taken cognizance, are full of the records of cases which have been brought to trial. Many of the guilty parties have been prosecuted and are now behind prison bars. Others are awaiting trial, and many others have escaped because of the difficulty of getting people to testify against them. One of the most dangerous leaders in the traffic has recently forfeited handsome holdings of real estate in Chicago, which she had put up for her bond, and escaped to France. Although fleeing from the United States into France, which is also one of the countries co-operating in the abolition of the white slave traffic, her passion for the business was so great that, when recently arrested in France, under a similar charge, she was found to have several young women from America in her clutches.

But as this law protects only immigrant girls, all the cases brought have been in the interest of these foreign girls. Thus far no one has undertaken to prosecute the offenders against American-born girls. When the curtain is drawn back upon the iniquitous system in which they have been the victims, a new chamber of horrors will be opened to the public gaze. But, thank God, good will follow, as is always the case when the light is turned on. Already laws have been presented before a number of state legislatures looking to the prosecution of those guilty of this inhuman traffic in native-born girls, and it will not be long before every state in the Union will have laws under which they can prosecute any man or woman guilty of this crime.

One of the great troubles in fighting this evil is the prejudice against fallen girls and the fact that because a woman is fallen seems to be just cause to convict her of every other crime in the decalogue, thus removing her from the pale of helpful sympathy which is extended to almost every other class of unfortunate beings. Even convicted murderers and kidnapers are treated with more intelligent sympathy. Every statement which she makes is at once considered to be untrue. So far has this prejudice gone that in the state of Missouri, in a decision by its supreme court, made some years ago, it was declared that a woman of immoral life was debarred from giving testimony in the courts of that state, as the fact of her immorality prevented her from being a credible witness. It declared at the same time that immorality did not in the same way unfit or debar a man. The difficulty of convicting a person under trial for such a crime as this is largely increased because of this attitude of the public mind. The evidence must be so overwhelming against the person that all of the quibbles and questions and flaws which is possible for the human mind to make, are answerable, and even then many will feel the guilty person has been unjustly punished, and that if the girl had really wanted to make her escape from her captors she could have done so.

The prosecuting of any other character of cases where the sex question does not enter is very much easier. Take the two last cases of kidnaping, which have interested the entire public and press of the country, as an example of what I mean. In the well-known Philadelphia case of 1908, in which an unusually bright boy of ten years was the victim, it was found that the kidnaper, a man, had taken the boy with him to lunch at several restaurants, had left him alone for hours in a vacant house, from the window of which he might at any moment have called to a passer-by and told him of his sad plight; had even sat several hours with him in the crowded Broad Street Station in Philadelphia, and yet, with all of these opportunities of making his trouble known, and escaping from the clutches of the man, the boy had taken advantage of none of them, but had sat silent and apparently a willing victim. In spite of these extenuating circumstances, it only took the jury a few moments to convict and send the guilty man to the penitentiary for a long period. Had the boy been a girl, and had she not made any more effort than he did to escape from her captor, and had the fact been known that the man had taken advantage of her innocence not only to kidnap her, but also rob her of her virtue, it would have been absolutely impossible to convict him of kidnaping. A recent case prosecuted in Baltimore, of a similar character, with these added features, proves the truth of this statement, the child being a girl eleven years old. The man was given a sentence of twenty-one years only, and that upon the ground of the child being under the age of consent. Even this verdict was considered extreme by many who believed that the child was willing to go with him because she had written a letter to her father and mother, in which she had not complained of ill treatment. It was proven that the little girl was made to write the letter by the man, who took it out and mailed it himself, and who forced her to write just what he said. Had little Billy Whitla been a little girl, and it was proven that she had sat in a buggy and had taken candy and accepted favors, and had been perfectly happy, as a child might, with her captor, it would have been a very much more difficult case to prosecute than that when the victim was a boy. In one the sex question would almost certainly have been introduced to the further undoing of the punishment for the crime.

Such work as the Woman's World is doing, as well as the Ladies' Home Journal and other well-known magazines, in giving publicity to these facts, will be of inestimable value in the protection of youth. Soon it will be impossible for human ingenuity to devise schemes for the undoing of girls that have not already been exposed by the daily papers and magazines, thus warning girls and their parents or guardians of the conditions under which they are placed. Had this information been given to the mothers alone, many of them are so ignorant of the present conditions that they would not have seen the necessity of informing their daughters. But coming, as it does, through the avenues of daily reading, it reaches the daughter as well as the mother, thus giving her the knowledge gleaned at a frightful cost by others, to protect her.

CHAPTER X.

WARFARE AGAINST THE WHITE SLAVE TRADE.

By Clifford G. Roe, Assistant State's Attorney of Cook County, Ill.

There is a problem of slavery today for the people to solve. The question is: "How shall the warfare against White Slavery be waged to blot out this cloud upon civilization expeditiously?" Over two years ago I learned that there was a gigantic slave trade in women, and with a handful of people we began to fight the traders. That a system of slavery, debasing and vile, had grown to enormous proportions before our very doors seemed beyond belief, an impossibility, and even romantic. Most people were skeptical of the existence of a well defined and organized traffic in girls, and they seemed to think that those advocating the abolition of this nefarious trade were either visionists or fanatics. The struggle against this trade in women was a hard one at first. The ministry, although dazed, were finally aroused to an appreciation of the truth.