When the judgment of her peers becomes not less firm but more kindly,
the self-supporting girl will have a safeguard and restraint many times
more effective than the individual control which has become so
inadequate, or the family discipline that, with the best intentions in
the world, cannot cope with existing social conditions.
The most perplexing case that comes before the philanthropic
organizations trying to aid and rescue the victims of the white slave
traffic, is of the type which involves a girl who has been secured by
the trafficker when so lonely, detached and discouraged that she
greedily seized whatever friendship was offered her. Such a girl has
been so eager for affection that she clings to even the wretched
simulacrum of it, afforded by the man who calls himself her "protector,"
and she can only be permanently detached from the life to which he holds
her, when she is put under the influence of more genuine affections and
interests. That is doubtless one reason it is always more possible to
help the girl who has become the mother of a child. Although she
unjustly faces a public opinion much more severe than that encountered
by the childless woman who also endeavors to "reform," the mother's
sheer affection and maternal absorption enables her to overcome the
greater difficulties more easily than the other woman, without the new
warmth of motive, overcomes the lesser ones. The Salvation Army in their
rescue homes have long recognized this need for an absorbing interest,
which should involve the Magdalen's deepest affections and emotions, and
therefore often utilize the rescued girl to save others.
Certainly no philanthropic association, however rationalistic and
suspicious of emotional appeal, can hope to help a girl once overwhelmed
by desperate temptation, unless it is able to pull her back into the
stream of kindly human fellowship and into a life involving normal human
relations. Such an association must needs remember those wise words of
Count Tolstoy: "We constantly think that there are circumstances in
which a human being can be treated without affection, and there are no
such circumstances."
CHAPTER VI
INCREASED SOCIAL CONTROL
When certain groups in a community, to whom a social wrong has become
intolerable, prepare for definite action against it, they almost
invariably discover unexpected help from contemporaneous social
movements with which they later find themselves allied. The most
immediate help in this new campaign against the social evil will
probably come thus indirectly from those streams of humanitarian effort
which are ever widening and which will in time slowly engulf into their
rising tide of enthusiasm for human betterment, even the victims of the
white slave traffic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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