What are We Going to Do About the Children?

A Group of Children in the Midst of the “Red Light” District

Levee women, women living in prostitution, “madams,” etc., do not bring up their children (and most of Chicago’s female dealers in prostitution have several of them) in or near segregated districts of vice. Like the saloon keeper who moved to Evanston to get his children away from the harmful, degenerating influences of the saloon and its environing neighborhoods, so the “madam,” that active principal in the slavedom of the girls of our Land, in almost every case sees to it that her children are well brought up, away from the influences and knowledge of prostitution, while her agents and keepers are out scouring the department stores, factories, villages and country homes for girls to fill the sickening, festering, shrieking ranks of the great death army of publicly protected White Slaves.

The writer has investigated many cases, and in every instance has found the children of these vultures of girlhood in exclusive colleges or military schools, being excellently prepared to take decent positions in business and social life. Case after case has recently come to light of women supporting their children on the fashionable avenues, in Harvard and military colleges, while they themselves with hearts of hell, wring the dollars that pay for these luxuries from the bleeding, broken bodies of a gang of Levee White Slaves—your sister and mine—younger than her own, better born, better raised, but lost forever in the crushing, barred and screened gehenna of modern harlotry.

Sixty-nine per cent of the children raised in the vast slum neighborhoods surrounding the segregated districts of prostitution are ruined before reaching the age of eighteen. This dreadful, appalling feature has been recently brought to light through close investigation by the writer and her co-workers, together with the sickening fact that little girls scarcely more than babies, are being constantly sought, secured and sacrificed to satisfy the cravings of abnormal, degenerate vice and debauchery abounding in every large city. These little children, painted and showily dressed, are fast making their appearance in such cities as New York and Chicago, and they are the forerunners of Oriental child debauchery. These little girls are seldom seen on the streets, but may be recognized when seen, by their deformed, bowed legs, bent backs and shrivelled little, old faces—such faces as we find in cripples aged by pain. Our hearts have been almost stilled as we have listened to the terrible stories of the hundreds of little girls in the ghastly fleshmarkets of India and China who, by the knife and the insertion into their tender bodies of wedges of expanding wood, are thus made ready, through months of torture, for the use of some inhuman Hindu or Chinese monster who for the sum of a few dollars purchases the use of their shrieking, quivering bodies, to leave them after a day or two of unparalleled debauchery, dead, or if still living, then with broken back or limbs, a human sacrifice indeed.

We have read and known all this and wished that we could die that these children might be saved—but listen, do we realize that with the influx into our midst, into our larger cities, of the vilest, most degenerate men and women on earth, thousands upon thousands of the most hellish brutes of Asia and China—men who reckon girlhood lower than the female dog, has come this very thing—this reeking, diabolical crime against innocent girlhood. Two especially revolting cases have come under the direct notice of the writer, yet without sufficient legal proof to face in court the organized, thoroughly financed hand of men and women exploiting these dreadful conditions: one, a girl Louise, on Custom House Place; the other, Rosie from the 22nd Street environments. The last named, cut, torn and bleeding, made a statement to the writer that cannot be put in print; yet she was by her owners accused of masturbation. Both of these girls were under ten years of age.

The exploitation of women in Chicago in the vast business of White Slavery and segregated vice, is carried on very openly and above board. Street walkers carry on their nefarious business of securing trade for the “house” almost entirely unmolested. Women stand in the doors of the West Side houses of ill-fame and solicit those who pass.

At 737 Washington boulevard, two doors west of the Chicago Rescue Mission, with which the writer is connected, a woman[1] stands in the door constantly soliciting each male passer-by; boys are invited to come in and take their first lesson in vice, and on this block are many, many children, boys and girls. One of the “girls” kept by this woman was a harlot known as “No-nose” whose whole face was so sunken with syphilis that her nose was almost gone. The writer remembers well when through the efforts of a fellow-worker “No-nose” was sent to the County Hospital for medical treatment, and considers this girl one of the greatest menaces to Chicago boyhood. No man would have touched the woman.

The blocks in this immediate vicinity are all thickly peopled by families with many children in them. The following group of little girls live in their alley-homes within a few doors of some of the worst sights and dives in Chicago.

Children of the Slums

They see no sights but vice, they hear no talk but filth. At the age of ten they are perfectly familiar with all the ins and outs of harlotry, know many prostitutes, many pimps.

Do you think these girls (each one is known to the writer personally) have any chance for virtue?

At 804 Washington Boulevard, almost across the street from the writer’s office, appears the following sign on the window of the cigar store located there.

Hundreds of the wreckage of typical White Slavery pass this place daily, for it is located at the edge of the great West Side dumping ground for broken, diseased women and young girls whose bodies can no longer be profitably used in the higher class dives of the South Side segregated districts, and who must at the end of a year or two become, if they are still living, the notorious women of the night who walk the streets and alleys, selling the use of their vile bodies for twenty-five cents, ten cents, a drink of beer or a crust of free lunch, becoming the prey of the drunken bum, the low vicious foreigner, the negro, or else the ruination of every young boy who falls into their vulture-like clutches.

In all Chicago there could not be a generally worse neighborhood than the one in which the White Slave Cigar is manufactured and advertised for sale. Within a few blocks of the factory, which is two doors west of the corner of Washington Boulevard and Halsted Street, there are a thousand broken, pitiful lost White Slaves.

Within two or three blocks of this corner, five typical White Slaves have been murdered (butchered would be a better word) within the space of just a few weeks. Here drunken women, the outcast element of the better class of dives, trail their filthy bodies day and night, their sunken, half-starved, syphiletic faces staring in your face, seeking the man or the young boy who will give them a drink of whiskey or a crust of bread in return for the wretched commerce they have to offer. Here, too, the children play and little girls grow into big girls with scarcely a ghost of a chance to be decent, and facing all hangs the sign “White Slave Cigar,” manufactured by George F. Walz.

It is out of this great outlaw district, this vast West Side charnal house of harlotry, that the City gets its supply of girls for that class of vice known as degeneracy.

Five years of work in prostitution constitutes the life of the average harlot. Many, before the time allotted to them in a life of ill-fame expires, die; many commit suicide, yet some live on, their diseased bodies constituting that class of girls known as street walkers and degenerates. These women, who are really only young girls, hang around the back rooms and cellars of the barrel houses, consorting with the drunken, crippled, diseased men who congregate in such places, and from this vast army of lost girlhood is supplied the material for the immoral Oriental shows abounding in the segregated districts, where with dogs and burros, the bodies of ruined, diseased girls are finally used up and destroyed, or in the bestial dives in which are practiced that horrible crime known as the “French method.”

Sixty-nine per cent of the little girls who must, through necessity and environment, grow up in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the segregated vice districts of such cities as Chicago, New York, Seattle, etc., are ruined before they reach the age of eighteen years. Think of it! These children know little else than drink and prostitution, hear little else, see little else. To them harlotry is in all its blasting, withering phases, a familiar story before they have reached the age of ten years. Hundreds of whore mongers, panderers, pimps and outlawed harlots, exploit their awful business and tell their vile stories as they walk the same pathway day by day with these children—little lost souls they are—the children of the poor, looked on in pity though by one who said “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me.”

THE TRANSIENT HOTEL EVIL.

In this vast underworld another trap almost as dangerous as the house of prostitution abounds on every hand—the so-called “hotel”—really a mere house of assignation in almost every instance. These hotels are a constant menace to the girlhood of our Land—girls who come to the city strangers, and are unable to discriminate between the good and bad. Dozens of these hotels flourish all around the districts of vice in our cities, the abiding place of the pimp, the beggar, the criminal, and yet flourish under complete political protection. We sincerely believe that the time for cleaning up has come in such cities as New York, Chicago, etc., and we believe that we have with us in this stand, not only decent Chicago and New York, but decent America.

CRUSADE AGAINST “WHITE SLAVERY.”

Thirteen governments have signed the international agreement to fight the traffic in women for immoral purposes. The terms have just been announced at Ottawa, Canada.

The list of countries, British colonies and protectorates which have decided to adhere to the Anti-White Slave Traffic Agreement are: Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, the Bahamas, Barbadoes, British Guiana, Canada, Ceylon, Australia, Gambia, Gold Coast, Malta, Newfoundland, Northern Nigeria, Southern Rhodesia, Trinidad and the Windward Islands.

The End of the Way. Where Young Girls, who attend Public Dances and Other Places of Amusement Unattended, are Likely to Wind Up