Chicago's Black Traffic in White GirlsTurner-Zimmermann, Jean
History
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
Turner-Zimmermann, Jean
Chicago (Ill.) -- Moral conditions; Prostitution -- Illinois -- Chicago
Harry A. Parkin, Assistant U. S. District Attorney, in WOMEN'S WORLD,
March, 1909, says:
"The Federal investigations in Chicago and other localities have
clearly established the fact that, generally speaking, houses of
ill-fame in large cities do not draw their recruits to any great
extent from the territory immediately surrounding them; for various
reasons the White Slavers who are the recruiting agents of this vile
traffic prefer to work in States more or less distant from the
centers to which victims are destined."
In view of all this, it must be clearly apparent that the need of the hour
is legislation which will make it as difficult and dangerous for a White
Slaver to take his victim from one State into another as it is to bring
them from France, Italy, Canada or any other foreign country, to a house
of ill-fame in Chicago or any American city. Therefore, it is suggested
that if each State in the Union would enact and enforce laws against this
importation, this terrible traffic would be dealt a blow in its most
vulnerable part.
One of the strangest results brought about by the recent White Slave
prosecutions in Chicago and the wide publicity which they have received
has been the astonishment of thousands of persons, as evidenced by
letters, at the fact that such a wholesale traffic is actually in
existence, but what is still more astounding, not to say discouraging, is
the reluctance of other thousands to believe that many hundreds of men and
women are actually engaged in the business of luring young girls and women
to their destruction and that this infamous traffic is being carried on in
every state of the Union every day of the year.
It is estimated by those who should know, that at least five thousand men
in Chicago live off of the earnings of prostitution. For instance as to
the plan: A young girl, alien or American, is sold into a life of ill-fame
for say Two Hundred Dollars, as the actual price of her procuring. Before
she suspects any real harm, she is lured into a restaurant or a wine-room,
becomes intoxicated, is sufficiently doped to become passive, is taken to
the "house" to which she has been consigned and is immediately "broken in"
in the most violent and nauseating manner, perhaps becoming the prey of
twenty or thirty men. Beaten, threatened with exposure, and, if necessary,
purposely infected with gonorrhea, the girl is within twenty-four hours
absolutely ruined for all time--"spoiled," the police say. Oh! what a
whole world of agony and pain and bruises and disease and Hell is embodied
in that one word "spoiled." She is immediately pressed into service and
from that time on until death relieves her, or she is rescued by some one
enough interested to help her, she must receive all comers THIRTY DAYS
every month.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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