What Do I Do When Kids On The Street Ask For Money?

It was Sunday. My family is on their way home from a big Sunday lunch. We stop for an errand and two little girls come up to our car. They are young, barely over six or seven years old, dressed in synthetic clothes, with wide grins and fidgety energy.

As we wait on the other side of electric windows the children begin to pull faces and thump tiny hands against the car. They appeal to my husband in the passenger seat, with bug wide-eyes asking him to put the window down. When he tries to ignore them, the run around the edges of the car asking my mother, sister and finally me to roll down the windows. In a playful (though slightly disconcerting tug) one of them yanks my unlocked door open and stands just within reach.

The children babble and casually ask for money. They speak English and are dressed in cheap, but formal clothes. As the fidget, I gently try and explain that pulling people’s doors open is rude. I pry their hands off the locks and try to gently close the doors. Not only do the children grow bolder, they grow more insistent — playing with the electric windows, toying with the child-lock and placing their fingers on the hinges of the door, ignoring us.

My sister grows frustrated and after a few minutes of me trying to explain to them calmly to go away, she yells at them. My mother throws in a hollow threat to call the police. When my father gets back in the car, they tease him, pulling open his door and placing their fingers in the hinges of the car door. In the end, my dad gives them The Look (the one my sister and I spent our lives scared of getting) at which they back off, retreating until he revs the engine and drives away.

For years, I have been unsure of what to do when someone approaches me for money. I have awkwardly shuffled, I have said “not now”, I have given money when I had it and I have averted my eyes and ignored it. And noone of them feels useful or helpful in any way. After school, I studied International Development, the study of poverty in the developing world. It meant months of pouring over statistics and programmes and how they affected the lives of the people living poorest in the world. And yet, and yet — when I am approached by someone for money — I still have no idea how to react.

As a development professional, my friends and collegaues have done the same. We have spent hours in discussions over nuances of poverty, dignity, ensuring access to education and health services and then taken a lunch break where we awkwardly ignore people asking for money. Most days, when the awkwardness passes, I fold this question into a little box and stash it at the back of my mind.

A few years ago, I spoke with a professional whose work focussed on begging and the reformation of beggary laws in India. He said very simply that the amount of poverty ‘fraud’ on the streets is minimal. Anyone on the streets asking for money is in a desperate condition, and the myth of the criminal mastermind who fabricates illness and disease to receive money is a belief propogated by popular media.

The argument that giving money to children makes them addicted to substances or part of an operation where adults exploit them may be valid and possibly true. But perhaps the larger question is whether or not giving a minimal amount of money is a way to appease ourselves that we are ‘contributing’ to the end of poverty, or avoiding giving money is making ourselves feel better by insisting that the money would not be used well. Either way, the people most affected by these decisions, continue to be left out of the conversation.

What do you think? Should we give money to children when asked on the streets?

#WonderWithMe

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