But we must understand that this sublimation of life is an investment. It requires that incessant attention and effort illustrated in document No. 36 (p. 62) and goes on best when life is economically secure. And there are families and whole strata of society where life affords no investments. There is little to gain and little to lose. Social workers report that sometimes overburdened mothers with large families complain that they have no “graveyard luck”—all the children live. In cases of great neglect the girl cannot be said to fall, because she has never risen. She is not immoral, because this implies the loss of morality, but a-moral—never having had a moral code.
55. Nine of the fifteen families [of the working class in Rome] are formed on a non-legitimate basis.... In fourteen of the fifteen families there is habitual obscenity.... The children hear and repeat the obscenity and are laughed at. Each member lives on the average on 25 lire a month.... Criminals and prostitutes frequent the homes and have liaisons with the girls. Mothers, going to work, leave the children with a prostitute.... The finer sentiments are notably lacking. Brothers and sisters quarrel and fight.... Fights are habitual in eight of the fifteen families.... The sentiment of modesty and delicacy does not develop in the young. The regard for the child is expressed in the remark of a father (about children who were not fed and picked up scraps on the street): “Let them have food when they make their own living.”[[57]]
56. Any person who has dwelt among the denizens of the slums cannot fail to have brought home to him the existence of a stratum of society of no inconsiderable magnitude in which children part with their innocence long before puberty, in which personal chastity is virtually unknown, and in which “to have a baby by your father” is laughed at as a comic mishap.[[58]]
57. The experiences of Commenge in Paris are instructive on this point. “For many young girls,” he writes, “modesty has no existence; they experience no emotion in showing themselves completely undressed, they abandon themselves to any chance individual whom they will never see again. They attach no importance to their virginity; they are deflowered under the strangest conditions, without the least thought or care about the act they are accomplishing. No sentiment, no calculation, pushes them into a man’s arms. They let themselves go without reflexion and without motive, in an almost animal manner, from indifference and without pleasure.” He was acquainted with forty-five girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen who were deflowered by chance strangers whom they never met again; they lost their virginity, in Dumas’s phrase, as they lost their milk-teeth, and could give no plausible account of the loss.... A girl of fourteen, living comfortably with her parents, sacrificed her virginity at a fair in return for a glass of beer, and henceforth begun to associate with prostitutes. Another girl of the same age, at a local fête, wishing to go round on the hobby horse, spontaneously offered herself to the man directing the machinery for the pleasure of a ride.... In the United States, Dr. W. T. Travis Gibb, examining physician to the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, bears similar testimony to the fact that in a fairly large proportion of “rape” cases the child is the willing victim. “It is horribly pathetic,” he says, “to learn how far a nickel or a quarter will go towards purchasing the virtue of these children.”[[59]]
58. In round numbers nine tenths of the delinquent girls and three fourths of the delinquent boys come from the homes of the poor. Sixty-nine per cent of the girls and 38 per cent of the boys come from the lowest class, the “very poor”, the class in which there exists not merely destitution, but destitution accompanied by degradation, or destitution caused by degradation....
In Table 19 it appears that 31 per cent of the delinquent boys and 47 per cent of the delinquent girls before their appearance in court had lost one or both parents by death, desertion, imprisonment, or similar misfortune, and that they had not had the benefit of the wholesome discipline which normal family life affords....
These children come in many instances from homes in which they have been accustomed from their earliest infancy to drunkenness, immorality, obscene and vulgar language, filthy and degraded conditions of living....
Among the 157 girls in the State Training School from Chicago, for whom family schedules were obtained, 31 were the daughters of drunken fathers, 10 at least had drunken mothers, 27 had fathers who were of vicious habits, 16 had immoral, vicious, or criminal mothers, while 12 belonged to families in which other members than the parents were vicious or criminal. In at least 21 cases the father had shirked all responsibility and had deserted the family.
There were also among these girls 11 who were known to be illegitimate children or children who had been abandoned, and there were 10 who had been victims of gross cruelty. Forty-one had been in houses of prostitution or had been promiscuously immoral, one having been “a common street walker” at the age of eleven. Four had sisters who had become immoral and had been committed to such institutions as the Chicago Refuge for Girls or the house of correction, while in seven cases two sisters had been sent to Geneva; nine had brothers who had been in such institutions as the parental school, the John Worthy School, the Bridewell, the state reformatory at Pontiac, or the state penitentiary at Joliet.
The worst cases of all are those of the delinquent girls who come from depraved homes where the mother is a delinquent woman, or from homes still more tragic where the father has himself abused the person of the child. As a result of the interviews with the girls in the State Training School at Geneva, it appeared that in 47 cases the girl alleged that she had been so violated by some member of her family. In 19 cases the father, in 5 the uncle, in 8 the brother or older cousin had wronged the child for whom the community demanded their special protection. In addition to these cases discovered at Geneva, the court records show that in at least 78 other cases the girl who was brought in as delinquent had been wronged in this way—in 43 of these cases by her own father. In families of this degraded type it is found, too, not only that the girl is victimized by her father but that she is often led to her undoing by her mother or by the woman who has undertaken to fill a mother’s place. It was found, for example, that in 189 cases where the girl was charged with immorality, the mother or the woman guardian—an aunt, a grandmother, or an older sister with whom the girl lived—was implicated in the offense if not responsible for it....