I read this article yesterday and man, I don't know. On the one hand, I think it's much too harsh to send people in prison for selling homeless magazines in front of grocery stores. I also find it...
Exemplary
I read this article yesterday and man, I don't know.
On the one hand, I think it's much too harsh to send people in prison for selling homeless magazines in front of grocery stores. I also find it pretty horrific that a pregnant woman can't get proper prenatal care just because she's an immigrant.
On the other, this seems to be a disabled woman who moved to Denmark specifically to beg, who is pregnant with her fifth child while already unable to provide for the four children she has. This doesn't sit well with me, and I think it's wrong to point a finger at Denmark for not accommodating her. I think a bigger focus should be on Romania and the way social support systems work here, but also on the Roma culture and the way it often clashes with other cultures. Why did this disabled woman have to move to another country to try and sustain her family? Between the help of her parents and the government, why can't she survive without having to beg on the streets of a foreign country? I don't really think there's a good reason for her to be in Denmark, and I don't think it's up to Denmark to fix her situation.
I'll also offer another perspective: I live in a central European town. We have our own homeless population that mostly gets along well with the rest of the locals - they're not violent people and I think we all understand that they're just down on their luck, for one reason or another. A lot of them sell the homeless newspaper, and I often buy it (although I do mind if they come begging while I'm eating or drinking outside with friends, but that's off-topic already). However, especially in the warmer months, we get an influx of beggars who don't speak the language and look visibly foreign. They don't really talk but tend to be more intrusive when begging, take over spots that the local homeless people frequent otherwise, and don't respect the overall 'code of conduct' that the local homeless have. They all appear at the same time and disappear just as suddenly a few weeks later, and we're all fairly convinced that this is organised begging where they get driven in by someone who is probably taking a cut of the money. Even if not, they're taking resources away from the local homeless in need, as well as making life harder for them. I don't know what the answer is here, but I do think this kind of 'seasonal' begging should be discouraged.
I don't know where they're from but in London on all the junctions of the motorways here, such as the A406 (North Circular), there are professional beggars. I've seen a van dropping them off. It's...
I don't know where they're from but in London on all the junctions of the motorways here, such as the A406 (North Circular), there are professional beggars.
I've seen a van dropping them off. It's clearly a good revenue scheme for someone (possibly not the actual beggar). It looks like they're shipping in their disabled for 'work'.
Seasonal or professional begging should definitely be discouraged imo.
It's an aspect of organized crime. Beggars and street sellers are often controlled by the local mafia, especially in tourist regions or places where the state is not as strong. Classic example is...
It's an aspect of organized crime. Beggars and street sellers are often controlled by the local mafia, especially in tourist regions or places where the state is not as strong. Classic example is southern Italy, but also the Balkans. Don't ever give your cash to beggars in Rome.
The majority of my family is back in the Czech Republic, which has a sizeable Roma (often called gypsies, though I think that can also be used in a deragatory fashion) minority (~20.5k for a...
The majority of my family is back in the Czech Republic, which has a sizeable Roma (often called gypsies, though I think that can also be used in a deragatory fashion) minority (~20.5k for a country of ~10.8 million on English wikipedia which are officially registered, with Czech Wikipedia putting it at close to 300k total), which would make them the second largest minority only to the Ukranians, which are of course a very sudden phenomenon. The Roma have been here for much longer.
It would be very fair to say that the majority of the native population have racist beliefs about the Roma (same as a lot of Europeans probably). People generally classify them as folks who come to Czechia and get a lot of children and rely on social services to keep them afloat while not contributing to the economy in other ways. Folks often have a personal story about a negative interaction with a Roma person, or they know someone who does. Either they've met a very persistent beggar, or they saw them receive a lot of cash from the local public office, etc. etc.
I think it's easy to hate on them because they are a small minority which chooses not to integrate and has their own customs. A bit like Jews. Also importantly, they look different. Now, taking the Wikipedia numbers as truth, it would mean that you have about 280k unregistered people existing in your country which have completely pulled out of the social contract. But that also clashes with the idea that they are "leeches" on the system, because to receive such help from the state you have to be registered, right?
Of course, if you have pulled out of society (or have been forced out) than the only remaining means of making a living are begging for it or entering the world of crime. Czech police does not collect information on the ethnicity of the perpetrator and even Wikipedia is quoting mostly old information on incarceration statistics, but it does point towards a 2x/3x rate of being in prison than the ethnically Czech population. This is by the way similar in my home country of Austria; Romanians are the biggest minority in prison.
It's a hateful cycle. A long time ago, Roma were othered because of their often nomadic lifestyle, their different looks, their different customs and their unwillingness to merge with the larger collective perhaps because of that othering, perhaps because people like sticking "with their own". Probably a mix of both. This has festered on for generations, and now you have this cycle of people unwilling/unable to enter a society that dislikes them and society disliking them because they're not entering it.
It's a hard problem to solve, and no one has tackled it, there are attempts for sure, but they are generally toothless and slow moving because the EU is a behemoth of beraucracy.
I know it's heartless, but I understand exactly why a country would outlaw begging (especially in public spaces). It's much much better for a society to have high quality social services available...
I know it's heartless, but I understand exactly why a country would outlaw begging (especially in public spaces). It's much much better for a society to have high quality social services available than to make people depend on random acts of charity.
I'm also a bit surprised the woman in this article hasn't been deported yet despite having a court order? I'm a huge supporter of immigration, but I don't see why Denmark should support a jobless woman from Romania. They should reform their labor laws to make immigrant labor easier, but in this case, I just don't see why Denmark should directly care for Romanian citizens.
I don’t really appreciate your comment because how does outlawing begging improve the quality of or access to social services? Also, here’s another thing to consider: by what metric are we even...
I don’t really appreciate your comment because how does outlawing begging improve the quality of or access to social services?
Also, here’s another thing to consider: by what metric are we even supposed to assess the adequacy of our social programs? I feel like the consequences of poverty tend to be pretty horrific. I feel like realizing that we have a serious problem with poverty by observing widespread begging, is probably like the least dangerous way to realize that we have a widespread poverty problem and that we need to reevaluate our support systems
Legalizing begging won't make any difference to the quality of the social services, but it will make more people rely on random acts of charity instead of existing support services. The woman this...
Legalizing begging won't make any difference to the quality of the social services, but it will make more people rely on random acts of charity instead of existing support services.
The woman this article profiles already lives in a homeless shelter, and it seems like all her immediate needs are being met. She wants more money to send remittances to family in Romania. I don't see how that justifies begging in public spaces. Denmark seems well within their rights to deport her to Romania and encourage her to find work where's she's a citizen instead of begging on their streets.
Do you think that there was some kind of working group that was tasked with identifying how to improve the situations of people struggling with poverty, and from that they determined that the best...
Do you think that there was some kind of working group that was tasked with identifying how to improve the situations of people struggling with poverty, and from that they determined that the best thing they could do for such people would be to criminalize begging? I guess I just really don’t appreciate this being framed as some kind of measure that was supposed to help people struggling with poverty, when it was obviously not the case. Criminalizing begging, is when you’re more concerned with the consequences of the problem than the problem itself.
It's a clumsy analogy, but it's kinda like criminalizing public drug use in my mind. Obviously throwing people in prison doesn't help (the "penalty" should just be treatment); the law is just in...
It's a clumsy analogy, but it's kinda like criminalizing public drug use in my mind. Obviously throwing people in prison doesn't help (the "penalty" should just be treatment); the law is just in place to give society the tools to enforce social expectations. If someone stands in high traffic areas hawking tchotchkes or begging for a hand out, I think that's a public nuisance and those people should be directed to social services.
I'm all for increasing the number of carrots and improving their quality to discourage this behavior. I just believe we need sticks as well like laws that say people shouldn't beg on street corners.
In this woman's case, I don't see how anything but a stick would help. I don't think she's garnering any sympathy immigrating to a wealthier country to beg on the streets. She's already received a deportation order.
It is absolutely better to have high quality social services available than to make people depend on random acts of charity. In such a society no one would be reduced to begging and thus there...
It is absolutely better to have high quality social services available than to make people depend on random acts of charity. In such a society no one would be reduced to begging and thus there would be no need for a law banning it, right?
Unless you have a perfect society where no-one ever tries to scam others or wants for more, there will always be beggers somewhere. In shared public spaces, I find it hard to rationalize giving...
Unless you have a perfect society where no-one ever tries to scam others or wants for more, there will always be beggers somewhere. In shared public spaces, I find it hard to rationalize giving limited space to people asking for handouts.
My view is countries should give people what they need through social services and encourage people to use the social services instead of begging.
And if the social services were good and were known to be good, no one would believe that a beggar actually needed what they said they needed. The scam depends on the possibility of the story...
And if the social services were good and were known to be good, no one would believe that a beggar actually needed what they said they needed. The scam depends on the possibility of the story being true.
We agree on the value of strong social services and the desire to not have the public throughoughfare clogged with independent entrepreneurs (whether they're selling trinkets or the good feeling of helping someone in need,) I just don't see the use of putting in laws to ban something when we can disincentivize the behavior by actually taking care of people.
See my other comment. Basically, the woman this article profiles already has her basic needs being met in a homeless shelter. She's a begger because she wants money to send home to family in...
See my other comment. Basically, the woman this article profiles already has her basic needs being met in a homeless shelter. She's a begger because she wants money to send home to family in Romania. She already has a deportation order too.
Since we both agree it's socially undesirable, what else could Denmark do to discourage begging in this case? I just don't see how Denmark could reasonably stamp out the behavior without making it illegal (doesn't need to be particularly harsh, just a way to redirect people to existing services).
Assuming the services are actually better than sleeping on the street, social services workers talking to the people who're on the street and putting them in contact with the services they need...
Assuming the services are actually better than sleeping on the street, social services workers talking to the people who're on the street and putting them in contact with the services they need has had some success in my area. One of the ongoing challenges is making sure that people know about the services that already exist, especially when word of mouth and rumor may not give an accurate picture of what can actually be done. Professional social service workers coming up to beggars and offering help also makes for a visible and regular reminder to everyone else that the beggar has access to resources beyond begging on the street, and provides a stumbling block to the beggar actually receiving donations if they're talking to a social worker instead of begging.
Can't disagree that they ought to be better than having to resort to begging. But I would hazard a guess that Romanian social services are probably really awful since she was driven to a foreign...
Can't disagree that they ought to be better than having to resort to begging. But I would hazard a guess that Romanian social services are probably really awful since she was driven to a foreign country more than a thousand kilometers away from her home country.
Romanian here - they're trash. If god forbid you lose your job and can't find another one, you will only get 660 RON per month from unemployment (it was increased this month actually, from 598)....
Romanian here - they're trash.
If god forbid you lose your job and can't find another one, you will only get 660 RON per month from unemployment (it was increased this month actually, from 598). That's enough for 1 meal a day, so if you have any debt whatsoever, you are fucked.
If you have a disability, you receive 300-400 RON per month. We have free(ish) public healthcare, but you often still need to pay for stuff so you can easily burn that on treatment and get left with nothing else.
There's a separate project going on right now, where disadvantaged people receive a meal card that gets refilled with 250 RON per month, so add that to the numbers above, but there's no guarantee this will be a thing long-term.
In my area we don't have that many homeless shelters. The main one in my city has room for 50 people. In any given day I can hang around the train station and count way more than 50 people who'd really need one in that area alone.
It doesn't help that we're shifting towards hostile architecture either.
Well a part of this particular group didn't want to integrate with society even in Romania. Before Romania joined the EU, all the countries were pointing fingers and saying you should take better...
Well a part of this particular group didn't want to integrate with society even in Romania.
Before Romania joined the EU, all the countries were pointing fingers and saying you should take better care of them, it's unacceptable, you need to do this and that. Some changes were made, some not but the result is more or less the same.
Now, that Romania is in the EU, "it's an EU problem" and it seems no country managed to solved it, even the ones that were pointing fingers. I know some social workers and teachers in schools for people with learning disabilities/harder to integrate and all of them are clueless about what to do.
It's hundreds of years of being slaves and then "being released" but kept away from normal society and they lived in their own closed off society. There was no real emancipation and even today many live in separate societies, in their own villages with their own rules. A lot have integrated and live just normal boring lives, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference from a regular Joe.
It's a super complex situation, which honestly I don't know how can be solved. If you approach it via normal ways, they will just take advantage of you, your money and not change anything in their mentality. You will be just a money bag. Maybe to force them to let their children go to school and through education they will change their way when they grow up? Dunno.
Illegally immigrate to a completely foreign country, pregnant and illiterate, no social security number, unable to speak the language.. and she's surprised she can't find a job? My first thought...
Illegally immigrate to a completely foreign country, pregnant and illiterate, no social security number, unable to speak the language.. and she's surprised she can't find a job? My first thought was "what the hell did you expect?"
Almost everything about these parties' ideologies and what they stand for and the laws about immigrants that they introduced back then, including this begging law, is condemnable. Especially since it sounds like begging is truly her last resort. Maybe they think they're doing good? Or maybe it's some "out of sight, out of mind" type policy, or the usual virtue signaling to scare migrants away.. either way, I feel for her and hope she finds a way to support her family and child. This is no way to live.
As another Dane I’m with you on being horrified. I have been living under a rock and didn’t know that such a law has been active for this long. I’ve seen the police engage with homeless people...
As another Dane I’m with you on being horrified. I have been living under a rock and didn’t know that such a law has been active for this long.
I’ve seen the police engage with homeless people around Christianshavn many times, and I’ve always considered it as part of the whole “sociolance” outreach. But now I’ll be looking at the interactions with a different perspective.
I wish real human decency was regarded more highly in politics.
I read this article yesterday and man, I don't know.
On the one hand, I think it's much too harsh to send people in prison for selling homeless magazines in front of grocery stores. I also find it pretty horrific that a pregnant woman can't get proper prenatal care just because she's an immigrant.
On the other, this seems to be a disabled woman who moved to Denmark specifically to beg, who is pregnant with her fifth child while already unable to provide for the four children she has. This doesn't sit well with me, and I think it's wrong to point a finger at Denmark for not accommodating her. I think a bigger focus should be on Romania and the way social support systems work here, but also on the Roma culture and the way it often clashes with other cultures. Why did this disabled woman have to move to another country to try and sustain her family? Between the help of her parents and the government, why can't she survive without having to beg on the streets of a foreign country? I don't really think there's a good reason for her to be in Denmark, and I don't think it's up to Denmark to fix her situation.
I'll also offer another perspective: I live in a central European town. We have our own homeless population that mostly gets along well with the rest of the locals - they're not violent people and I think we all understand that they're just down on their luck, for one reason or another. A lot of them sell the homeless newspaper, and I often buy it (although I do mind if they come begging while I'm eating or drinking outside with friends, but that's off-topic already). However, especially in the warmer months, we get an influx of beggars who don't speak the language and look visibly foreign. They don't really talk but tend to be more intrusive when begging, take over spots that the local homeless people frequent otherwise, and don't respect the overall 'code of conduct' that the local homeless have. They all appear at the same time and disappear just as suddenly a few weeks later, and we're all fairly convinced that this is organised begging where they get driven in by someone who is probably taking a cut of the money. Even if not, they're taking resources away from the local homeless in need, as well as making life harder for them. I don't know what the answer is here, but I do think this kind of 'seasonal' begging should be discouraged.
I don't know where they're from but in London on all the junctions of the motorways here, such as the A406 (North Circular), there are professional beggars.
I've seen a van dropping them off. It's clearly a good revenue scheme for someone (possibly not the actual beggar). It looks like they're shipping in their disabled for 'work'.
Seasonal or professional begging should definitely be discouraged imo.
It's an aspect of organized crime. Beggars and street sellers are often controlled by the local mafia, especially in tourist regions or places where the state is not as strong. Classic example is southern Italy, but also the Balkans. Don't ever give your cash to beggars in Rome.
The majority of my family is back in the Czech Republic, which has a sizeable Roma (often called gypsies, though I think that can also be used in a deragatory fashion) minority (~20.5k for a country of ~10.8 million on English wikipedia which are officially registered, with Czech Wikipedia putting it at close to 300k total), which would make them the second largest minority only to the Ukranians, which are of course a very sudden phenomenon. The Roma have been here for much longer.
It would be very fair to say that the majority of the native population have racist beliefs about the Roma (same as a lot of Europeans probably). People generally classify them as folks who come to Czechia and get a lot of children and rely on social services to keep them afloat while not contributing to the economy in other ways. Folks often have a personal story about a negative interaction with a Roma person, or they know someone who does. Either they've met a very persistent beggar, or they saw them receive a lot of cash from the local public office, etc. etc.
I think it's easy to hate on them because they are a small minority which chooses not to integrate and has their own customs. A bit like Jews. Also importantly, they look different. Now, taking the Wikipedia numbers as truth, it would mean that you have about 280k unregistered people existing in your country which have completely pulled out of the social contract. But that also clashes with the idea that they are "leeches" on the system, because to receive such help from the state you have to be registered, right?
Of course, if you have pulled out of society (or have been forced out) than the only remaining means of making a living are begging for it or entering the world of crime. Czech police does not collect information on the ethnicity of the perpetrator and even Wikipedia is quoting mostly old information on incarceration statistics, but it does point towards a 2x/3x rate of being in prison than the ethnically Czech population. This is by the way similar in my home country of Austria; Romanians are the biggest minority in prison.
It's a hateful cycle. A long time ago, Roma were othered because of their often nomadic lifestyle, their different looks, their different customs and their unwillingness to merge with the larger collective perhaps because of that othering, perhaps because people like sticking "with their own". Probably a mix of both. This has festered on for generations, and now you have this cycle of people unwilling/unable to enter a society that dislikes them and society disliking them because they're not entering it.
It's a hard problem to solve, and no one has tackled it, there are attempts for sure, but they are generally toothless and slow moving because the EU is a behemoth of beraucracy.
I know it's heartless, but I understand exactly why a country would outlaw begging (especially in public spaces). It's much much better for a society to have high quality social services available than to make people depend on random acts of charity.
I'm also a bit surprised the woman in this article hasn't been deported yet despite having a court order? I'm a huge supporter of immigration, but I don't see why Denmark should support a jobless woman from Romania. They should reform their labor laws to make immigrant labor easier, but in this case, I just don't see why Denmark should directly care for Romanian citizens.
I don’t really appreciate your comment because how does outlawing begging improve the quality of or access to social services?
Also, here’s another thing to consider: by what metric are we even supposed to assess the adequacy of our social programs? I feel like the consequences of poverty tend to be pretty horrific. I feel like realizing that we have a serious problem with poverty by observing widespread begging, is probably like the least dangerous way to realize that we have a widespread poverty problem and that we need to reevaluate our support systems
Legalizing begging won't make any difference to the quality of the social services, but it will make more people rely on random acts of charity instead of existing support services.
The woman this article profiles already lives in a homeless shelter, and it seems like all her immediate needs are being met. She wants more money to send remittances to family in Romania. I don't see how that justifies begging in public spaces. Denmark seems well within their rights to deport her to Romania and encourage her to find work where's she's a citizen instead of begging on their streets.
Do you think that there was some kind of working group that was tasked with identifying how to improve the situations of people struggling with poverty, and from that they determined that the best thing they could do for such people would be to criminalize begging? I guess I just really don’t appreciate this being framed as some kind of measure that was supposed to help people struggling with poverty, when it was obviously not the case. Criminalizing begging, is when you’re more concerned with the consequences of the problem than the problem itself.
It's a clumsy analogy, but it's kinda like criminalizing public drug use in my mind. Obviously throwing people in prison doesn't help (the "penalty" should just be treatment); the law is just in place to give society the tools to enforce social expectations. If someone stands in high traffic areas hawking tchotchkes or begging for a hand out, I think that's a public nuisance and those people should be directed to social services.
I'm all for increasing the number of carrots and improving their quality to discourage this behavior. I just believe we need sticks as well like laws that say people shouldn't beg on street corners.
In this woman's case, I don't see how anything but a stick would help. I don't think she's garnering any sympathy immigrating to a wealthier country to beg on the streets. She's already received a deportation order.
It is absolutely better to have high quality social services available than to make people depend on random acts of charity. In such a society no one would be reduced to begging and thus there would be no need for a law banning it, right?
Unless you have a perfect society where no-one ever tries to scam others or wants for more, there will always be beggers somewhere. In shared public spaces, I find it hard to rationalize giving limited space to people asking for handouts.
My view is countries should give people what they need through social services and encourage people to use the social services instead of begging.
And if the social services were good and were known to be good, no one would believe that a beggar actually needed what they said they needed. The scam depends on the possibility of the story being true.
We agree on the value of strong social services and the desire to not have the public throughoughfare clogged with independent entrepreneurs (whether they're selling trinkets or the good feeling of helping someone in need,) I just don't see the use of putting in laws to ban something when we can disincentivize the behavior by actually taking care of people.
See my other comment. Basically, the woman this article profiles already has her basic needs being met in a homeless shelter. She's a begger because she wants money to send home to family in Romania. She already has a deportation order too.
Since we both agree it's socially undesirable, what else could Denmark do to discourage begging in this case? I just don't see how Denmark could reasonably stamp out the behavior without making it illegal (doesn't need to be particularly harsh, just a way to redirect people to existing services).
Assuming the services are actually better than sleeping on the street, social services workers talking to the people who're on the street and putting them in contact with the services they need has had some success in my area. One of the ongoing challenges is making sure that people know about the services that already exist, especially when word of mouth and rumor may not give an accurate picture of what can actually be done. Professional social service workers coming up to beggars and offering help also makes for a visible and regular reminder to everyone else that the beggar has access to resources beyond begging on the street, and provides a stumbling block to the beggar actually receiving donations if they're talking to a social worker instead of begging.
Can't disagree that they ought to be better than having to resort to begging. But I would hazard a guess that Romanian social services are probably really awful since she was driven to a foreign country more than a thousand kilometers away from her home country.
Romanian here - they're trash.
If god forbid you lose your job and can't find another one, you will only get 660 RON per month from unemployment (it was increased this month actually, from 598). That's enough for 1 meal a day, so if you have any debt whatsoever, you are fucked.
If you have a disability, you receive 300-400 RON per month. We have free(ish) public healthcare, but you often still need to pay for stuff so you can easily burn that on treatment and get left with nothing else.
There's a separate project going on right now, where disadvantaged people receive a meal card that gets refilled with 250 RON per month, so add that to the numbers above, but there's no guarantee this will be a thing long-term.
In my area we don't have that many homeless shelters. The main one in my city has room for 50 people. In any given day I can hang around the train station and count way more than 50 people who'd really need one in that area alone.
It doesn't help that we're shifting towards hostile architecture either.
Well a part of this particular group didn't want to integrate with society even in Romania.
Before Romania joined the EU, all the countries were pointing fingers and saying you should take better care of them, it's unacceptable, you need to do this and that. Some changes were made, some not but the result is more or less the same.
Now, that Romania is in the EU, "it's an EU problem" and it seems no country managed to solved it, even the ones that were pointing fingers. I know some social workers and teachers in schools for people with learning disabilities/harder to integrate and all of them are clueless about what to do.
It's hundreds of years of being slaves and then "being released" but kept away from normal society and they lived in their own closed off society. There was no real emancipation and even today many live in separate societies, in their own villages with their own rules. A lot have integrated and live just normal boring lives, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference from a regular Joe.
It's a super complex situation, which honestly I don't know how can be solved. If you approach it via normal ways, they will just take advantage of you, your money and not change anything in their mentality. You will be just a money bag. Maybe to force them to let their children go to school and through education they will change their way when they grow up? Dunno.
Illegally immigrate to a completely foreign country, pregnant and illiterate, no social security number, unable to speak the language.. and she's surprised she can't find a job? My first thought was "what the hell did you expect?"
My second thought:
Almost everything about these parties' ideologies and what they stand for and the laws about immigrants that they introduced back then, including this begging law, is condemnable. Especially since it sounds like begging is truly her last resort. Maybe they think they're doing good? Or maybe it's some "out of sight, out of mind" type policy, or the usual virtue signaling to scare migrants away.. either way, I feel for her and hope she finds a way to support her family and child. This is no way to live.
Not illegal immigration as she is a Romanian citizen (EU country) going to Denmark (EU country)
Thanks for the correction. I guess I thought "undocumented" was synonymous
I'm getting a 404 on that imgur link.
Hmm works for me.
Different host: https://ibb.co/0FHDmd9
As a Dane, this makes me sick to my stomach. I don't want another ban, so I won't say what I think of people supporting this.
As another Dane I’m with you on being horrified. I have been living under a rock and didn’t know that such a law has been active for this long.
I’ve seen the police engage with homeless people around Christianshavn many times, and I’ve always considered it as part of the whole “sociolance” outreach. But now I’ll be looking at the interactions with a different perspective.
I wish real human decency was regarded more highly in politics.