We must particularize these unfavorable environmental influences. And the first fact that we meet is that a part of the young prostitutes have been incited to the profession by their parents. Parent-Duchatelet mentions 16 cases in which mother and daughter were both registered prostitutes[110]; and von Oettingen quotes the following from Dr. Tait:[111] [[332]]
Edinburgh.
There were found among the prostitutes:
| 2 | mothers with | 4 daughters | each, or | 8 in all, |
| 5 | mothers,, with,, | 3 daughters,, | each,,, or,, | 15 in,, all,, |
| 10 | mothers,, with,, | 2 daughters,, | each,,, or,, | 20 in,, all,, |
| 24 | mothers,, with,, | 1 daughter | each,,, or,, | 24 in,, all,, |
| 41 | mothers with | 67 daughters in all |
In the second place it is necessary to speak of the abandonment of the children of the poor classes. No scientist of consequence admits that the moral ideas are innate, but simply that the new-born infant is more or less fitted to appropriate such ideas. It follows that one cannot expect much from a child whose moral education has been neglected in youth, however great natural capacity he may have been endowed with. From this it follows that where there is lack of education and care because of the death of the mother, or the alcoholism of the father, or because the father and mother are both at work away from home a great part of the day, or where the morality of the parents themselves is not great, the children run great risk of being lost. The following figures support this assertion:
Von Oettingen shows that, according to Dr. Ryan, 12,000 to 14,000 prostitutes in London became such as a consequence of a neglected childhood.[112] In the “Reports of the Select Committee,” etc., the following figures are found:[113] of 3,075 prostitutes 1,481 (48%) were orphans, and 921 (29%) were half-orphans. In his “La prostitution clandestine à Paris”, Dr. Commenge gives the following figures concerning the 2,368 prostitutes whom he observed during the years from 1878 to 1887:[114]
| 692 | (29%) | were orphans; |
| 456 | (19%) | had lost their mother; |
| 811 | (35%) | had,, lost,, their,, father. |
Out of a total of 190 cases Dr. Bonhoeffer shows 72 (38%) in which the education had been positively bad (criminality or prostitution on the part of the parents, neglect, lack of surveillance, etc.); 106 cases (56%) in which the education had been probably bad; and only 12 cases (6%) in which it was proved that the education had been good.[115]
For Russia Dr. Fiaux gives the following figures:[116] 3.6% of the [[333]]prostitutes still had father and mother; 47.5% had parents who were separated, and 18.5% were without any family.
With regard to the cause given for prostitution Dr. Augagneur says as follows: “The majority of prostitutes are born to prostitution at the same time that they are to puberty. Their moral sense, if such may be called that which no one has ever tried to awaken, is not shocked by their situation; they have prostituted themselves without shame and without regret. They have left normal and respectable society without being really aware of its existence, without the desire of ever returning thither. They have lacked the things necessary to make them respectable women—instruction in virtue, the example of their relatives, the suspicious surveillance of their mothers, and material well-being. The daughters of the people are not, at the day of their birth, of a clay inferior to that of the daughters of the bourgeoisie or of the nobility; they are naturally no less intelligent, no more perverse. And yet if you examine the civil status of a hundred prostitutes, you will find that 95 at least have sprung from the lowest strata of society. The existing social inequality, that is to say, is alone responsible for this unequal distribution.”[117]