Don’t Give That Child a Dollar

October 10, 2012, 

The New York Times

By MARK MCDONALD

 

Agence France-Presse: Street children in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital.

HONG KONG — The high season for tourism has nearly arrived in Southeast Asia, and shelter directors and child-welfare activists across the region are worried about the inevitable wave of well-heeled visitors giving money to street children begging for dollars and euros.

The kids, of course, are hard to resist, with their ragamuffin clothes, sad faces and fractured English phrases. And what tourist, after already spending thousands on airfare and hotels, can’t spare a dollar here and there? Why not hand over a few bucks for a plastic bracelet or some postcards?

But children’s groups and aid workers, almost universally, are against the tourist handouts, which they say derail schooling, enable child predators and perpetuate familial cycles of poverty.

“Essentially, when you give money to street kids, you’re paying them to not be in school.”

— Sam Flint

Sam Flint is the director of Anjali House, an education center for former street children in Siem Reap, Cambodia, the site of the famed Angkor Wat temple complex. Impoverished families come from all over Cambodia, he says, especially when crops or businesses fail, so their children can beg from the tourists in Siem Reap.

“The bottom line is that giving money to street kids is not productive in solving the issues with them, with their families or with them being on the streets,” Mr. Flint told Rendezvous in an interview Wednesday. “There are more complicated issues going on behind their cute faces and shabby clothes.

“Essentially, when you give money to street kids, you’re paying them to not be in school.”

Parents, too, can get hooked on the money that a begging child can earn. Instead of working a regular job to make a few dollars a day, a parent can send out a child who can bring home $15. The parents don’t make efforts to find honest work, and the begging itself, Mr. Flint said, “comes to be regarded as work.”

He described a common tourist scam in Siem Reap known as “baby milk.”

Shabbily dressed children hang around convenience stores where tourists might be ducking in for a bottle of water, some gum or a tube of sunscreen. The kids often are carrying dirty-faced infants with them, presumably a baby brother or sister, and Mr. Flint said there are persistent rumors that the babies are sometimes drugged to make them lethargic.

The child pleads for milk for the baby, and the tourists are taken inside the shop where a can of infant formula is pointed out. The well-meaning tourists buy the milk — it runs about $12 a can — which the child re-sells to the shop once the tourists have gone.

To spread the word about begging, United Nations volunteers, child charities and aid groups introduced a campaign in Cambodia last year called Think Twice, with the informal motto, “Let parents earn and children learn.”

“It’s very difficult to get that message out to people unless they’re looking for it,” Mr. Flint said.

The ChildSafe Network offers advice and ideas here about how to make effective contributions that help poor children and orphans.

Travelfish, a travel blog site, offered this take on child begging in Cambodia:

Giving to street kids is a short-term solution that ensures that long-term answers are more difficult to implement. It helps to ensure that they stay poor for the rest of their lives and, as uneducated parents, means that their children will probably be just as poor too. It ensures a thriving labor market for young children who should not be working, many of whom are not from Siem Reap at all but brought in from other provinces to work the streets. Worse yet, working on the streets not only impairs their education, it exposes these children to predators: traffickers, drug dealers and child sex tourists.

Another travel blogger, Michael Hodson, has written against giving money to street children, saying it “reinforces a culture of helplessness and dependency,” with the money often going to “criminal gangs that run the operation from behind the scenes.” In his travels, he said locals have staunchly advised him against giving handouts.

But Mr. Hodson, an American, said he makes exceptions when in Laos and Cambodia.

“There, I was confronted with bomb and land mine victims that were missing limbs — missing entirely because of the actions of my country,” he said.

Riding his bike one day at Angkor Wat, he passed some musicians asking for contributions. “Then I noticed their prosthetic legs sitting next to the platform they played on,” he said. “Never was a gift easier to give than on that day.”

So what do you do when traveling in less developed areas? Do you give street kids a couple dollars or a few euros? Do you do this out of guilt, charity, or both? Or do you resist giving money to the kids? Do you think child begging is usually a scam? Any related travel tales you’d like to share? And please, speak freely.