12 NOVEMBER 1927, Page 11

PART II. OF THE REPORT.

The results of these investigations have been embodied in Part I. of the Report of the Special Body of Experts, and in Part II., which will shortly be published. Every man and woman who cares about the moral health of the young of both sexes should study this document. There is no getting away from the facts; the traffic exists, and the evidence not only demonstrates this, but at the same time accounts for its existence. For it reveals such terrible conditions and so shameful a life that, by a natural gravitation, girls foreign to the country concerned tend to become the victims ; they are both more easily trapped and procured and more easily kept in bondage. Many of these wretched victims, girls conveyed under tilt impression that they are married to the Souteneurs, girls betrayed by false or impossible theatre and cabaret engagements which leave them stranded in a foreign country, girls inveigled by the offer of genuine work, prostitutes who enter into contracts quite unaware of the kind of service which will be demanded of them—these literally become slaves and prisoners. The most sinister part of the whole horrible business is not only that ordinary prostitution is recruited from country to country, not only that a certain percentage— perhaps about 30 per cent.—are young girls and " frightened

and bewildered children " who have been kidnapped in various ways, but that prostitutes and innocent alike are the prey of an organized system of the worst forms of abnormal vice, infinitely more degrading than ordinary. prostitution. Nothing is so disturbing to an easy shrugging of the shoulders attitude—unfortunately very common when sex subjects are discussed—as some of the comments, made by Souteneurs and Madames under the impression that they are talking with colleagues, embodied by the investigators in this Report. Says one Souteneur, speaking of a girl who would not practise perversion : " She couldn't make a living ; I had to send her back. If she had done as I had told her she would have had enough money to retire to-day." And a Madame offered a new girl says : " If she does not practise perversion I do not want her."