... Painful facts are revealed to us in this report by Miss Wadad Abu Nader, social worker at the Union for the Protection of Juveniles in Lebanon ... lifting the veil from a social reality that we all have the right to learn about, and to know what results it is leading to ...

Lebanon talked for a while about those vagrant and begging children whom the authorities arrested, and perhaps of late it has forgotten their story, for all its importance, and let their cause slip from mind, with all the sorrows it suggests, the burden it carries, and the question marks it raises!..

Human and social duty requires of us, for the sake of these children and for the sake of Lebanon, that we raise more than one question and await more than one answer, from the people and from the government alike.

To what fate have these little

ones of ours come — children who wandered the streets for a time and fell victim to a corrupt system of upbringing, to ignorance and neglect?

Has anyone felt that the number of vagrants in the city has gone down?

I believe only a few raised the first question. As for the second matter, many are those who have noticed, in their comings and goings on this street and that, in this crowd and that one, the dwindling or vanishing of those who used to block their way — barefoot, ragged, hungry, with their sallow, wasted faces, their abject, insolent words, and the pickpocketing and thefts they used to commit.

I believe many felt this and cried, "Thank God, we are rid of them!"

•

To these we say: not so fast...

Put your hand in ours and come, let us look out through a new window

With a band of vagrant children in the street?

onto a new horizon, through which we may glimpse these little ones as children of our own, pieces of society's flesh walking upon the earth. They had no will in what they came to and wallowed in; rather we all alike — citizens and state — had a share in their dark fate and in the gloomy world of their existence.

And it falls to us, in answer to the call of necessity and the imperative of human cooperation, before we thank God over this misfortune, to grasp the extent of our share of responsibility and of duty, and to take part in the salvation of these innocent souls, who still have time enough before them to grow into conscious manhood, sound in body and in mind...

•

Eighty children were arrested in two nights and placed in the old Finance building — girls and boys ranging in age between seven and fifteen springs.

The investigating judge assigned to the case questioned them

and handed their case over to the Juvenile Court, which in turn referred their files