How to Fight Vagrancy

When a person is stricken with some malady, the physician's first concern is to learn the causes of the malady, so as to treat it on foundations that guarantee a cure.

And vagrancy is one of the gravest of the social maladies confronting the Arab world today. Those responsible stand perplexed before the task of fighting it, anxious over the fate of this wretched class, which is estimated at more than half the total of the nation; for the factors that produce vagrancy are frightfully widespread, and no one here has been alert to ward off this danger as the West was alerted long ago, working earnestly and in cooperation to remove its sudden, destructive causes — such as wars and the killing and displacement that accompany them, which breed despair and resentment in the souls of individuals and awaken the instinct of self-preservation by any means whatever.

The belief that once prevailed, which held that 'the criminal is born a criminal,' has passed away. Psychologists have proved that human beings are, to a certain point, alike in their natural constitution: all of them have instincts of good and instincts of evil, and the disparity that arises among them has its source in upbringing, the home, and the environment. Poverty, ignorance, harsh circumstances, and corrupt company work upon their character, and they walk step by step down into the abysses of vagrancy, driven by the instinct of survival. They are, then, the victims of upbringing, environment, poverty, and ignorance; and the fault is not theirs, but the fault of those responsible, and of society — you, and you, and I.

Walk with me through the streets and alleys of the cities and villages, and enter the cinema halls and the tramway cars, and you will see the thousands of juvenile beggars and wandering hirelings scattered about, jostling one another and crying their wares, driven on by need. These are sought out and led astray by those steeped in the slippery ways of theft, pickpocketing, swindling, and crime — and childhood is artless — it walks the road down which it is driven. And if they are arrested for some slip, the greater abyss awaits them in prison: the neglect, cruelty, and contempt they meet there, to say nothing of their listening to the tales of the criminals and what they learn from them — all this breeds in their souls hatred of society, despair, love of recklessness, and revenge.

Dr. Cyril Burt, the British psychologist, mentioned in his book 'The Young Delinquent' that 70% of the children who appeared before the courts came from stricken homes. And it is certain that most delinquent children do not live even a life of bare sufficiency and quiet, but live where there is no stability, no tenderness, no hoped-for future. Childhood has claims upon the neck of society; if they are squandered, collapse follows.

And let us remember that all neglected children carry within them the predisposition to delinquency, just as most vagrants are neglected children; and the neglect of children has its source in ignorance, or poverty, or family corruption — which are the chief chronic causes to which the East has not given sufficient attention, and which it has not treated with the swift, effective treatment.