<P> Numerous communities appointed vice commissions to investigate the extent of local prostitution, whether prostitutes participated in it willingly or were forced into it, and the degree to which it was organized by any cartel - type organizations . The second significant action at the local level was to close the brothels and the red light districts . From 1910 to 1913, city after city changed previously tolerant approaches and forced the closing of their brothels . Opposition to openly practiced prostitution had been growing steadily throughout the last decades of the 19th century . The federal government's response was the Mann Act . The purpose of the act was to make it a crime to "transport or cause to be transported, or aid to assist in obtaining transportation for" or to "persuade, induce, entice or coerce" a woman to travel . Many of the changes that occurred after 1900 were a result of tensions between social ideals and practical realities . Family form and functions changed in response to a complex set of circumstances that were the effects of economic class and ethnicity . </P> <P> According to historian Mark Thomas Connelly, "a group of books and pamphlets appeared announcing a startling claim: a pervasive and depraved conspiracy was at large in the land, brutally trapping and seducing American girls into lives of enforced prostitution, or' white slavery .' These white slave narratives, or white - slave tracts, began to circulate around 1909 ." Such narratives often portrayed innocent girls "victimized by a huge, secret and powerful conspiracy controlled by foreigners", as they were drugged or imprisoned and forced into prostitution . </P> <P> This excerpt from The War on the White Slave Trade was written by the United States District Attorney in Chicago: </P> <P> One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement . This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners . Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards "white slavery" in places of this character . </P>

Who is a minor according to immoral traffic act