Vautrin appealed to the Japanese consulate to rein in the troops. The consulate posted military police officers to the Jinling campus, but the MPs themselves began to rape. On Christmas Eve, with nine thousand women and children packed on campus and a quarter of a million refugees in the safety zone, a Japanese officer arrived at the school and demanded that Chinese prostitutes be rounded up to service his men. The idea, Vautrin wrote in her diary, was to “start a regular licensed place for the soldiers then they will not molest innocent and decent women.” Vautrin found twenty-one prostitutes.
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