How They Fought Vagrancy in the West

Among the ugliest sights in Beirut is the sight of those children, vagrant in the streets, loitering on the doorsteps of houses and in the dark corners.

A generation of youth we are rearing for crime and corruption... and no one cares, and no one asks... Would that we might take from the West this virtue as well!! May this voice reach the ears of those responsible in Lebanon. Let them lift these poor, wasted creatures off the roads...

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The nations of the West—especially Great Britain and Scandinavia—have proved the truth of the saying, 'a dirham of prevention is better than a qintar of cure.' Individuals, private associations, and the government have set to work together to ward off vagrancy, that danger deadly to the nation, and are laboring to root it out. They began with reformatories for boys and girls, equipping them with every facility—study, guidance, and the various trades—nor did they neglect varied sport and recreation in them. Then they laid down effective plans, beginning with care for the expectant mother and her infant: they built free hospitals and dispensaries, where the mother—from the beginning of her pregnancy—and her infant after the birth receive health care and the necessary nourishment; and they founded fully equipped kindergartens and infant, elementary, secondary, and vocational schools—all of them free—through which the children, boys and girls, pass from one institution to the next until the child settles in the trade to which he inclines. Nor have any of these schools neglected sport of every kind and pleasant recreation, so that the child may choose what pleases him.

Doctors, women doctors, and nurses watch over their health, and specialists, men and women, in every branch and trade watch over their progress in learning and morals.

In Great Britain they have built the reformatories in the most complete fashion, where the boy and the girl find bodily and mental care and recreation, and each works at the trade that suits him. And they began the fight on two foundations:

First—care for the child.
Second—reform of the family's condition.

Mr. 'Chen' said, at the conference on social studies held by the organization attached to the United Nations, under the chairmanship of Sir Raphael Cilento, in Beirut in August 1949—a conference in which delegates, men and women, from all the Arab countries took part: 'The many experiments Great Britain has been making for a number of years have succeeded brilliantly, and today she is able to secure the reform of the individual's condition from the cradle to the grave.'

The statistics he presented showed that three out of every four expectant mothers come to the dispensaries for examination, and that committees of doctors, women doctors, and nurses visit the families, look into the children's health in the first year, acquaint themselves with the condition of the mother and the home and the family's problems, and visit 96% of the children annually. This supervision and treatment continue to the fourth year; from the fifth, the child is sent to kindergarten, then to the infant schools, then the elementary, then the secondary—all free—and every child in these schools is given a third of a pint of milk daily, free of charge, while the midday meal is provided to nearly half the school children at a trifling price. As soon as the boy or the girl finishes their secondary studies, the 'National Youth' organization helps them find work suited to their inclinations; this organization cooperates in its work with the Ministries of Labor and Social Affairs, and its aim is to keep in touch with young men and women throughout the age of adolescence.

By the united efforts of these private and government institutions the rising generation finds opportunities for work, sport, and recreation. In 1949 the government enacted a law creating clubs for adolescents of both sexes, aided financially by the 'National Youth' organization, which looks after them when their studies are done, to provide them sport and recreation alongside work. The institutions taking part in this work number twenty-two.

The government also gives the family financial help—five shillings a week for every child except the first-born and the only child. And in 1948 a law was enacted for the care of children without breadwinners until they reach the age of seventeen; these are entrusted either to foster parents or to a volunteer family, all of it subject to strict supervision and inspection.

There is not today, in Great Britain or Scandinavia, a man or a woman whose livelihood is not assured; and all this has been accomplished thanks to the cooperation of the wealthy, the private institutions, and the government—the greater burden of responsibility and expense being borne by the government. After learning of these measures, is it possible for any boy or girl to slip and fall into vagrancy??