2017: The year of the beggar
So who or what did 2017 belong to? Of course you can’t go past the exceptional Jacinda Ardern, whose reluctant donning of the Labour leader mantle transformed the election and led to a coalition with a Muldoonist to form a government.
Ardern represented generational change and hope for a more egalitarian country.
The year was also a watershed moment in relations between the sexes, particularly in the workplace. American films can often speak for the zeitgeist but it was the behaviour of film and media people in America that caused men around the world to examine their own attitudes and step more carefully, even fearfully.
The year was also marked by the increasingly strident and influential voices on social media. Anyone brave enough to offer a genuine opinion wondered where the next onslaught was coming from. To bookend the point, the year ended with Lorde cancelling her concert in Israel after an open letter on social media.
However for me 2017 belonged to the beggar. It was as if a plague of beggars descended on our big cities in 2017 to test our compassion and generosity and in many cases our gullibility.
The business of begging means its participants need to place themselves for maximum exposure and foot traffic and the more abject they seem, the more effective they will be.
They can quickly turn an area into an appalling mess.
It wouldn’t be any better – well maybe a little bit – if the beggars were wearing tidy suits and smelled nice.
This is because the worst thing about the begging fraternity is the implication that somehow their predicament is our fault.
Not directly but because they raise the question of what sort of society would force people to beg in the streets to survive. And because we seem to be at peak beggardom, the scale of our dysfunction and hard-heartedness seems to have rocketed to a new level.
Cities everywhere are floundering in getting to grips with a problem that is much more complex than it appears.
Is begging, for instance, a symptom of homelessness? Not in Christchurch where the Christchurch City Mission chief executive Matthew Mark says the number of beggars has increased despite the count of those sleeping rough remaining stable.
People should not give beggars money as most of them are not homeless and money dropped into their hats is more likely to fuel alcohol or drug addiction, he says.
‘‘[For] most of them it is their business and they are making a jolly good living out of it.’’
The same pattern emerges overseas. A 2015 street survey commissioned by the Nottinghamshire Police and conducted by the homeless charity Framework found only five of the
52 individuals spotted asking for cash were sleeping rough with 16 living with friends or family and
26 having their own homes.
The survey found 27 of the 52 people had alcohol issues, 26 admitted to being substance misusers and five had mental health problems.
Mark’s view is shared by people like Jeremy Swain, chief executive of the London homelessness charity Thames Reach.
Campaigns to stop begging are needed, argues Swain, ‘‘because of the incontrovertible evidence that the vast majority of people begging on the streets are doing so in order to purchase hard drugs’’.
Some beggars will be in genuine need but can be hard to help. Due to underlying addictions or mental illness they can’t be housed even by charities prepared to put up with all sorts of nonsense. They probably need fulltime institutional care but our institutions are over-run with more serious cases.
More effective laws banning begging are an option but they are only as good as the effort put in to enforce them. Police have better things to do and penalties stopping short of incarceration won’t keep beggars off the streets.
The state has to make begging unattractive for scammers while getting genuine ones off the street by providing the help they need. That might require permanent residential and institutional care for some.
It’s naturally a lot cheaper to leave them on the streets.
People have the solution in their own hands. Beggars will soon get the message if it’s not worth their while. Charities looking after the homeless and hungry will gladly take the money.
Should we make giving money to beggars illegal? The Norwegian government tried. It wanted to ban organised begging, which would criminalise beggars and those deemed to have helped them.
The move was jettisoned after an international outcry.
So what’s the solution? It’s complicated.
Indeed, that could be the slogan for the whole year.
"[For] most of them it is their business."
Christchurch City Mission CEO Matthew Mark