Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade
History
Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade
Prostitution
That night she slept in an Army Rescue Home, and stayed with us for some
time. An operation, made necessary by the life she had been forced to
live, ended her days; but she died in peace, confident that she was
going to a world where sorrow and sin never can enter.
Captain G., a Salvation Army officer while doing house to house
visitation in the "Red Light" district, was amazed to meet a woman who
came from her own township in the Fatherland.
It was perhaps a sentimental feeling which prompted the woman so freely
to speak to the officer in reference to her chosen life. She said that
years ago she had been beguiled to this country by an advertisement,
which promised a good home and good wages to suitable girls. She replied
to the advertisement and in due time was met at a Chicago railway
station by the parties with whom she corresponded; and a few hours later
found to her horror, that her confidence had been betrayed and that she
was an unwilling guest of a resort.
There seemed to be no way of escape; and as time went on she grew
accustomed to it and concluded that as others were making money in such
fashion, she would follow their example. For years she has maintained a
disreputable house, and most of the girls who live in it were entrapped
and snared from their country homes much after the same fashion as she
herself.
A Canadian school girl started to make a visit to her married sister in
New York State. The train reached its destination several hours late.
The sister, who had been waiting at the railway station for hours, had
just returned to her home when the train arrived; thus there was no one
to meet the little girl at the end of her journey.
A man who had been lounging around the railway station, stepped up and
asked her whom she was waiting for. Innocently enough she told him the
whole story, when he remarked that he had been sent by the sister to
take her to her home. Stepping into a carriage they drove to a well
appointed house; but in his haste to leave the station unobserved, the
man had forgotten to ask for the check for the child's trunk.
Leaving the little one, he returned to the station where the married
sister was frantically making inquiries in reference to the traveler and
was told that no one, answering that description, had stepped from the
train. However the trunk standing there with the child's initials on it
made her confident that her sister had arrived and, in some unexplained
fashion, had disappeared.
While the controversy with the station-master was going on, a man came
up to claim the trunk; and an innocent girl was thus saved from the
hands of the procuress, for the house to which she had been taken proved
to be a notorious house of ill-fame.
No steps were taken in this case, as in thousands of others, to punish
the wrong-doer; the sister dreading the notoriety, which would follow
such a case.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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