Sessional_Paper_1886-1887 — Page 194

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Straits Settlements. The American market is now no longer open. Young girls, brought up with the idea that they are the property of their "pocket-mothers" or mistresses (and that they are so the "pocket-mothers and mistresses inculcate with much assiduity), cannot be expected to make much fight for liberty or virtue even if they all knew their rights. As a matter of fact the loyalty of these girls to their "pocket-mothers" or mistresses is such that often when they seek to be registered as prostitutes and are closely catechised as to their freedom, they will break into tears and protest that not only are they willing to become prostitutes but that it is their wish in order to provide for their mother or father or some near relations. The notion of duty of a Chinese daughter, natural-born or adopted, is that she must postitute herself if the person in loco parentis indicates that it is expected of her. Frequent reports have shewn how difficult it is to get these girls to help themselves; and that although they know they can claim their freedom, as a rule they feel that to do so would be dishonest to the women who had bought them at Canton and placed them in brothels. In recent years, however, an improvement has been apparent. The trouble that the Government has taken to explain the position of these unfortunate women has not been in vain. In every room in every Chinese registered brothel in the Colony a printed notice is exhibited explaining that the girls are free, and that if they have been deceived, pledged, or sold they can always get their liberty at once. Every registered woman gets one of these papers. Their visitors see and read these papers to them, and some man who perhaps fancies one of these girls for a concubine tells her that she has only to go with him. He easily persuades her to leave; often abandons her afterwards, or perhaps he may induce her to go to the Straits Settlements ostensibly as his wife and sell her into a brothel there. But that many more of these women now leave the brothels than formerly without paying up their mistresses what they owe, or letting the pocket-mother know their intentions is unquestionable. The consequence is that the brothel keepers find that to advance money on a girl on a promise of brothel service is an unsafe security, and before long I believe no such advances will be made in Hongkong, a result greatly to be desired.

III.

Kidnapping partly chargeable to the Chinese systems of Adoption and Domestic Service.

I have shewn in the foregoing paragraphs how by a fraud upon the parents the Chinese system of purchasing female children for adoption and domestic service is abused. My remarks have been directed to the training up of girls for prostitu- tion and selling them into "brothel slavery" when the parents had voluntarily parted · with their offspring in order to be daughters and servants, "to be provided with husbands when they came to womanhood"; but there is yet another evil which the Chinese themselves admit their custom encourages. I refer to kidnapping. In China that crime is a capital offence. A kidnapper loses his head very promptly if caught and convicted on the other side of our boundary. In Hongkong the crime was found to be so common that in 1868 a law was passed which enabled the Supreme Court to flog in addition to other punishments. That law had a very wonderful effect. It did not apply of course to women, and hence female child- stealers were more common than males.

Children are stolon (1o) to be ransomed.

(2°) to be sold.

When a child is missing the parents advertise in the public thoroughfares and offer rewards, and the person who has stolen the child or a confederate pretends to find the child and obtains the reward, or, what is more frequent when the children (whether males or females) are stolen from Canton or the country, the children are sold to be adopted sons or domestic servants. There are generally four or five persons engaged in this transaction. The child-stealer manages to get three or four old women to find out somebody who wants to buy a son or daughter or servant. The child has been carefully taught to call its kidnapper "mother "aunt"; or "father" or "uncle," if a man. The intending purchaser sees the child and inquires how it comes to be sold. The go-between and other women vouch that it is owing to the poverty of the parents, and the child when questioned will

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