What Shall we do With Oar Girls ?

Manawatu Standard, Volume IX, Issue 11, 17 April 1885, Page 2

What Shall we do With Oar Girls ?

[Past.] Some months ago we drew attention J to the large number of young girls to be seen about our streets at late hours of the night, and pointed out the moral dangers to which their use of the key of the street exposed them, and the almost inevitable result. At the same time we urged that something should be done to remocly this sad state of things. Subsequently we published a letter trom Mr Brown, the night watchman on the Queen's Wharf, which discloses the existence of a truly appalling amouut of juvenile depravity and systematic imiuirnorality. His statement is that youne girls are constantly attracted for immoral purposes on board of vessels lying alongside the wharf, and that thereare m the city regular training schools for vice and prostitution. Mr Brown has furnished us with the names of a number of young girls who are, he says, constant frequenters of the wharf, at late hours of the night. We have no reason to believe that Mr Brown has at all overdrawn the picture,! and we ask, is such a condition of affaire to be allowed to continue to exist m the very heart of a Christian city ? It is a scandal and a disgrace to our boasted' civilisation that young girls by the dozen and the score should be allowed to drift uni cared for into the very depths of degradation and vice. Surely some effort should be made to save them. We hear \of collections m our churches m aid of foreign missions. People are often appealed to for subscriptions to send misi sionaries to the New Hebrides and simi- ; lar places ; quite lately a lady has been lecturing about the Zeana Mission to India ; there is a Seaman's Mission, aud all sorts of other so-called charitable and religious organisations, yet here, m our very midst, is a social cancer, a festering moral sore, of the very worst possible description, which no one seems to deem it a duty, or worth while to attempt, to cure. Young girls are being allowed, m large numbers, to drift to absolute ruin of body and soul, without a hand being stretched out to save them. More attention seems to be given to preventing cruelty to animals than to the protection of the purity or moral welfare of the young girls around us. We once again appeal to the philanthropic men and women of Wellington to do something effectual to check the growth of this great evil, and avert consequences which will injuriously affect far more than the immediate victims if something is not done and done soon.