Newsgroup: it.scienza.ambiente
Titolo: Re: législation roller

in reference to the special questions I have raised,
    I have only to observe that I have never heard of those
    difficulties. My own impression is that the respectable parts
    of the community, Chinese as well as European, including the
    Government and the police, are fully alive to the brothel and
    domestic servitude systems, and as well informed as Sir John Smale
    himself as to the real facts. One would suppose from the tone
    of his pamphlet that he stood alone in his perception and
    denunciation of evil. But I believe the fact is that the Executive
    and the community generally are quite as anxious is he is to
    insist upon practical precautions necessary to prevent the abuses,
    and to diminish the evils naturally connected with these systems,
    but they look for this to practical securities and not to
    declamation. The obvious line of practical suggestions to take is
    that of careful registration and constant inspection of brothels,
    so that full and frequent opportunity may be given to all persons
    whose freedom may be open to suspicion to

Daly,
having spent ten dollars in self-indulgence in native houses, the
Government reimbursed them and punished the women.
In 1865, on three separate occasions, the "Protector," (Acting
Registrar General Deane), "declared" houses, nine in number. Soon any
sort of testimony was gladly welcomed, and Malays, East Indians and
Chinese all turned informers, and money was not only given them with
which to open the way for debauchery, but awards upon conviction of
the women with whom they consorted. "The Chinese used for this work
were chiefly Lokongs, [native police constables], Inspector Peterson's
servant and a cook at No. 8 Police Station. The depositions show
that in at least five cases the police and their informers received
rewards. Three times their exertions were remunerated by sums of
twenty dollars, although in one of these instances the evidence was
apparently volunteered. Arch and Collins [Europeans] once got five
dollars each, and Chinese constables received similar amounts." In
many of these cases the immorality on the part of the informers who
brought the charges seems to have been unblushingly stated. "The
zeal of inspectors of brothels and informers had been stimulated by
occasional solid rewards from the Bench, and the numerous prosecutions
commenced seldom failed to end in conviction and substantial
punishment."
Ten years after the Ordinance of 1857 had been in operation, the
Registrar General, C.C. Smith, wrote:
    "There is another matter connected with the brothels, licensed
    and unlicensed, in Hong Kong, which almost daily assumes a graver
    aspect. I refer to what is no less than the trafficking in human
    flesh between the brothel-keepers and the vagabonds of the Colony.
    Women are bought and sold in nearly every brothel in the place.
    They are induced by specious pretexts to come to Hong Kong, and
    then, after they are admitted into the brothels, such a system of
    espionage is kept over them, and so fright

business have Governments hounding down these women, tearing away
their last shred of decency and obliging them if inclining to go wrong
to sink at once to the lowest depths of infamy? But that is what the
attempt to localize vice in one section of a town, or to legalize it
always means. When the informer at Hong Kong had insinuated himself
into a native house and by means of the bait of "marked money" caught
a victim and sinned with her, at once he threw open the window and
summoned the Inspector, who was in waiting outside, who would rush
in and arrest all the women and girls in the house, down to children
often only 13 or 14 years old. This was not all according to law, but
it seems to have been the regular practice. Says Mr. Lister, who was
Registrar General for the first year after the Ordinance of 1867 came
into operation: "As a general rule, the first thing I knew of a case
of an unlicensed brothel coming before me was the finding of a string
of women in my office in the morning." "Almost despotic powers" had
been put into the hands of the "Registrar General," and these were
some of the results. The "marked money" that had caught the victim
would now be sanctimoniously taken away from her and restored to the
Secret Service Fund. The woman would be fined or imprisoned, and the
other inmates of the house put through trial as accused of being
"common prostitutes" and inmates of an unlicensed brothel, and if the
Registrar General so decided, the house from which they came declared
in the Government Gazette as a licensed house of prostitution. The
keepers of licensed brothels, slave-dealers, procurers and such
characters hung around the court room to help these women pay their
fines, and so get them under bonds to work off these fines by
prostitution. Sometimes the women sold their children instead of
themselves. If boys, for "adoption," as it is called; a fo