Identifier: B20442506 (find matches)
Title: Fighting the traffic in young girls, or, War on the white slave trade (electronic resource) : a book designed to awaken the sleeping and to protect the innocent a complete and detailed account of the shameless traffic in young girls ...
Year: 1911 (1910s)
Authors: Bell, Ernest A. (Ernest Albert), 1865-1928 Chicago (Ill.). Vice Commission
Subjects: Prostitution
Publisher: (Chicago? : L.H. Walter?)
Contributing Library: Wellcome Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Wellcome Library

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"FRIENDS" MEETING EMIGRANT GIRL AT THE DOCK
"The girl was met at New York by two 'friends' who took her in
charge. These 'friends' were two of the most brutal of all the white
slave traders who are in the traffic.
—U.S. Dist. Attorney Edwin W. Sims
Foreign girls are more helplessly at the mercy of white slave hunt-
ers than girls at home. Every year thousands of girls arriving in
America from Italy, Sweden, Germany, etc., are never heard of again.

WHITE SLAVE TRADE 135

One of the great troubles in fighting this evil is the prejudice
against fallen girls and the fact that because a woman is fallen seems
to be just cause to convict her of every other crime in the decalogue,
thus removing her from the pale of helpful sympathy which is extended to
almost every other class of unfortunate beings. Even convicted murderers
and kidnapers are treated with more intelligent sympathy. Every
statement which she makes is at once considered to be untrue. So far has
this prejudice gone that in the state of Missouri, in a decision by its
supreme court, made some years ago, it was declared that a woman of
immoral life was debarred from giving testimony in the courts of that
state, as the fact of her immorality prevented her from being a credible
witness. It declared at the same time that immorality did not in the
same way unfit or debar a man. The difficulty of convicting a person
under trial for such a crime as this is largely increased because of
this attitude of the public mind. The evidence must be so overwhelming
against the person that all of the quibbles and questions and flaws
which is possible for the human mind to make, are answerable, and even
then many will feel the guilty person has been unjustly punished, and
that if the girl had really wanted to make her escape from her captors
she could have done so.

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