For parents these girls had fathers who worked twelve hours a day in the steel mills and came home at night half dead from lack of rest and sleep; and mothers who toiled equally long hours in the kitchen or over the washtub and were too weary to know or care what the girls did after school.

For social opportunity the girls had "going downtown." Perhaps you know what that means.

It means trooping up and down the main street in lively groups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth a cheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a street accident or a fight.
About this time the panic of 1907 descended suddenly on South Chicago and turned out of the steel mills hundreds of boys and men.

Some of these were mere lads, sixteen to eighteen years old.

They, too, went "downtown." There was no other place for them to go.
As a plain matter of cause and effect, what kind of a moral situation would you expect to evolve out of these materials?
Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood.