New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Prostitutes -- Fiction
Under the second heading in that portion of Your Honor's charge
quoted above, which refers to the procuring of women who are already
prostitutes and placing them with their consent in houses where they
may ply their trade, the Grand Jury has made a special study of the
class of disorderly houses commonly known as "Raines-Law Hotels," the
chief business of many of which is to provide a place where women of
the streets may take their customers. The testimony given shows that
girls who brought their patrons to certain hotels of this class were
allowed rebates on the amount charged their patrons for rooms. Upon
the evidence brought before us, indictments were found against seven
of the most notorious of these hotels.
The abuse which has grown up in the conversion of the so-called
massage and manicure parlor into a disorderly house, frequently of
the most perverted kind, has received our careful study under this
same heading. A special investigation has been made of some 125
massage and manicure parlors, in this county. Less than half of
these establishments were found to be equipped for legitimate
purposes, most of them being nothing but disorderly houses. The
operators in such places had no knowledge of massage treatment, and
in certain cases where certificates of alleged massage institutes
were on the walls of the premises they frankly admitted that they had
no training in massage and did not even know the persons whose
signatures appeared on the certificates.
In view of the above, it would seem important that these parlors
should be licensed by the Health Department of the city and that all
operators in them should also have a license from some approved
health or medical authority, and further, that proper supervision
should be exercised to insure their operation for the legitimate
purposes for which they are licensed.
The spreading of prostitution in its various forms from the
well-known disorderly house into apartment and tenement houses
presents a very grave danger to the home. It is inevitable that
children who have daily evidence of the apparent comfort, ease, and
oftentimes luxury in which women of this class live should not only
become hardened to the evil, but be easily drawn into the life. The
existing laws for the suppression of this vice in apartment and
tenement houses should be most rigorously enforced and if necessary
additional legislation enacted.
But of the evils investigated under this head, the most menacing is
the so-called "pimp" who, as already stated, while often active in
seducing girls, is, to what seems to be an increasing extent, living
on the earnings of the professional prostitute, constantly driven by
him to greater activity and more degrading practices.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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