The British popular imagination portrayed the Limehouse district of London as a center of moral depravity and vice, i.e. sexual prostitution, opium smoking, and gambling. The popular press warned of the dangers of miscegenation, of Chinese men marrying British women as a racial threat to white Britain, and warned that Triad gangsters kidnapped British women into white slavery, "a fate worse than death" in Western popular culture. In 1914, at the start of the First World War, the Defense of the Realm Act was amended to include the smoking of opium as proof of moral depravity that merited deportation, a legalistic pretext for deporting the Chinese inhabitants of Britain. That anti-Chinese moral panic derived from the social reality that British women were financially independent by way of war-production jobs, which allowed them the sexual freedom of men, a cultural threat to Britain's patriarchal society. Hence, Yellow Peril racism was the psychological projection of European cultural and sexual prejudices against miscegenation onto the Chinese communities as seducing British women into libertinism.