What are your thoughts on giving money to beggars?
What are your thoughts on giving money to beggars?
I am asking because I know people from both sides:
- People who discourage it: usually talk about how the beggars might spend their money on, how they might be lying, How donating to them will encourage them to keep begging and how they should be looking for a job instead (My commentary: finding a job is impossible for them this days, matter of fact there is literally hundreds, if not thousands of articles online talking about how hard and impossible it had become).
- People who encourage it: to be honest here, they usually talk only about religious reasons.
(Note: I know that the overview about both sides are highly unbalanced, but I preferred to keep it limited to my personal experiences rather than expanding it from myself, as I intentionally not looking for theories and objective logic, rather I am looking at people reasons and opinions as this is highly subjective matter.)
Anyone got any thoughts about this?
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Vehemently against it. Far too easy to abuse - there's been criminal gangs that force people to beg. I've even heard of criminal gangs crippling people they traffic to give them visible disabilities to make the begging more effective. Giving money to beggars - even if they're not being trafficked - still makes begging worthwhile and increases the likelihood it will be made into a gang activity. We need government programs that handle it, or give your money to a charity instead, which makes sure the money goes to effective programs that help people in real need.
But what if the poor person who is asking you for money, is unable to access any help or charity?
I know that the easy answer is to not give any money to beggars and to only give it to charities, but that also has its own set of problems.
They can go to the cops. I get this may not seem ideal to them if they are in fact doing something illegal. And again: giving money to beggars encourages begging -> more human trafficking. It's a very, very direct causation. I rather not get into that.
My take is that your $5 or whatever isn't going to really make a difference either way in the grand scheme of things because this issue is systemic and you can't fix systemic issues as an individual taking a small action.
We have an insanely large issue with meth and heroin addiction where I live and so I've become quite jaded on the issue after seeing the results of it for so long. I'd be inclined to give money to someone actually down on their luck but I'm not giving shit to some loudmouth tweaker who's probably going to come by my house later and steal my kid's bike or commit identity theft on my elderly neighbors with zero remorse. These types of people are on the streets because they've burned every bridge in their life already. Addiction is a mental health issue but that doesn't absolve everyone from the responsibilities of their actions. Some people can't help themselves due to disabilities whether physical or mental and these people deserve help, but there's a good segment of people who just don't want to give up the life.