By Andrzej Ciepły (published in cooperation with the Jagiellonian Club think tank)
Article 58 of Poland’s Petty Offences Code states that “anyone with a livelihood or able to work who begs in a public place” is subject to a penalty of community service, a fine up to 1,500 zloty or a reprimand. Those who beg “persistently or fraudulently” may also be detained by the police.
This law has not been changed since its introduction in 1971, and is today often criticised for being archaic and not reflecting reality. Nowadays we know more about poverty and the associated processes and social phenomena. Work, although essential, is no longer the “right, duty and matter of honour of every citizen” it was defined as in article 14 of Poland’s communist-era constitution.
Among the law’s biggest critics is the former human rights commissioner Adam Bodnar, who twice, in 2017 and 2021, appealed to justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro to initiate legislation to change it. To date, however, the ministry has not reacted.
According to Bodnar, a reason to return to the issue now is an unprecedented ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) from January 2021. The Lăcătuş v. Switzerland case concerned a fine of 500 Swiss francs imposed on the plaintiff for begging in a public place in Geneva. The ECHR decided that a blanket ban on begging is a radical measure demanding strong justification and adjudication of competing interests by courts.
What does poverty mean?
One of the many problems with article 58 is its imprecision – particularly with the use of the general terms “livelihood” and “able to work”, which it does not clarify. Their meaning is all the more confusing since several levels of poverty are distinguished in Poland. The most acute is extreme poverty, which the country’s statistics agency (GUS) bases on the subsistence minimum, estimated by the Institute of Labour and Social Studies (IPiSS). At this level, a person’s health and life is endangered.
In 2019, the poverty line was set at 616.55 zloty (€135) monthly for a single-person household. There is also relative poverty, meaning monthly household expenditure of less than 50% of the average.
The next concept is the sphere of social exclusion, determined by GUS on the basis of the social minimum also estimated by IPiSS. In 2019 this was 1,212.59 zloty (€266) monthly for a single-person household. Living for less means that a basic minimum of life cannot be provided, in both biological and social terms.
According to Ryszard Szarfenberg’s “Poverty Watch 2020” report from 2019, 4.2% of Polish society was affected by extreme poverty and 13% by relative poverty, while some 39.4% faced social exclusion.
It is unclear which of these three levels of poverty and exclusion satisfy the statutory condition of possessing a livelihood that determines whether Polish law deems begging to be acceptable.
What to do about begging?
Yet the outdated law is not the only problem with begging. So widespread is the phenomenon that many people doubtless do not even realise that it is illegal. The reason why the government does not want to interfere with this archaism could be the fact that abolition would force them to take a firm position on a difficult and controversial subject. It is better to leave the status quo and pretend that there is no problem out of fear of an electorate that continues to believe the myths around poor and homeless people.
Strategies vary when dealing with begging. Some people offer to buy food or other specific products. Others give nothing, not wishing to support people living on the street and trying to force them to make use of social welfare centres.
Some people give money to people who look ill or emaciated, while others prefer “honest” beggars who admit to needing money to buy alcohol. Knowing what strategy to adopt is not helped by the contradictory messages from experts and organisations supporting poor and homeless people.
Numerous public information campaigns argue that even by helping once we do more harm than good, keeping beggars away from social welfare and consolidating their street life, homelessness crisis and addictions. One such campaign was organised in 2018 by the municipal family welfare centre in Gdańsk and the Brother Albert Aid Society, working with the local police.
The campaign stressed that such support of homeless people risks reinforcing their presence on the street. Because people can earn several hundred zloty per day begging, they do not hesitate to feign disabilities and use other tricks to arouse compassion, it warned. The campaign organisers said that giving money to beggars may mean sponsoring alcohol and other substance addictions. Interestingly, they also mentioned article 58 as an additional argument.
Of course, the bare information provided by NGOs and welfare centres in such campaigns is true. Their staff can also hardly be accused of ill will. Yet it is hard to resist the impression that such initiatives are targeted more at the people begging themselves than the social problems that forced them into such lifestyles. After all, is a strategy of combating street homelessness based on forcing people to use the help of centres by cutting off the alternative not ethically dubious?
The first step to full resocialisation should be the conscious and voluntary choice of the people in crisis, and not leaving them no choice by cutting off other possibilities. One could say that people living in such advanced social exclusion and affected by so many social pathologies should be supervised to an extent, and their re-entry to society carefully overseen by specialist social workers until they are satisfied that their client is able to operate fully independently and normally.
However, such thinking does not conform to modern methods of counteracting the phenomenon of homelessness such as the “Housing first” model, which emphasises where possible listening to the individual needs and free will of people experiencing homelessness.
Dehumanising the poor
While such initiatives have noble aims, by tarring all people who beg with the same brush they can help to increase the social ostracism that affects people from the lowest classes. Posters also encourage readers to make contact with the beggar, ask about their needs and suggest a place to get help, but this is often forgotten. We should be doing our best to dispel myths and stereotypes about homelessness and begging.
Michał Bilewicz, a psychologist at the University of Warsaw, notes that as well as dehumanisation, infrahumanisation – the belief that one’s ingroup is more human than an outgroup – is a common problem.
This is much more subtle in denying the humanity of social groups or individuals such as homeless people, drug addicts or beggars. We subconsciously remove such characteristics as kindness, resourcefulness or intelligence from these people, and react to a picture of a homeless or begging person with less empathy than to one of retired people.
On the one hand, to an extent this reaction results from the protective function of our brain, which wants to spare us the constant trauma we would have to live with if every sight on the street caused the same compassion. On the other, though, this comfort does not correspond to reality, and we should try to break down barriers rather than putting them up.
Begging among children
One thing that public information campaigns must be praised for is broaching the extremely important social problem of people, especially children, being forced to beg. In extreme situations, this operation even involves human trafficking, and is therefore an especially delicate and difficult subject.
In legal terms, this question is clarified by article 104 of the Petty Offences Code, which states foresees detention, community service or a fine for inducing a minor or helpless or dependent person to beg.
Begging among children is therefore a more serious issue, as free will is replaced by the risk of supporting organised crime. Here too, however, there are voices looking at the issue from another angle. Sister Małgorzata Chmielewska of the Bread of Life Catholic community notes that not supporting begging children exposes them to violence in their families, as they are compelled to beg a specific amount in a day.
A dangerous sense of superiority
A common approach is to say “I won’t give you money, but I can buy something else, for example food”. This allows us to make contact with the person begging, to ask about their needs, minimise the risk of sponsoring an alcohol habit, and can also offer the opportunity to point out the nearest support centre.
The problem with this approach, however, is the subconscious assumption that we know better what the person asking for money needs than they do. Homeless people do not have fridges or hygienic ways to store food, so shopping for them often makes no sense.
But they might need devices such as a mobile telephone or torch, which are first-aid products for us but we subconsciously deny homeless people.
Substandard shelters
In the context of the risk of worsening the alcohol problems of people begging and consolidating their lives on the streets, it is important to consider the standard of the centres we are so keen to send them to. The poor state of some shelters and hostels makes it clear why homeless people do not want to choose this form of accommodation, at least in the summer season.
Adriana Porowska, a social worker and head of the Camillian Mission for Social Assistance, says that society does not understand the sacrifices that lie behind accepting help at a centre and commencing the seemingly unending process of leaving homelessness.
“People staying in a shelter are faced with very high demands: sleeping in a dormitory, following the rules, endless work for the centre. Or on the contrary, there is no work activation programme organised for them,” she notes.
“Not to mention the fact that there are places which are simply a horror to be in: bug-infested, underfunded, uncared-for. There are often acts of violence there. The residents often sleep fully clothed out of fear of theft. Offering such ‘assistance’ is also violence.”
We recently profiled Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, who has become known as the "Pope's Robin Hood", using his position in the Vatican to help the homeless, refugees and transgender sex workers.
Some have talked of Krajewski as a potential future pope himself https://t.co/feQBegkNiy
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) September 13, 2020
A Supreme Audit Office report on “Initiatives supporting and activating homeless people” published in 2020 revealed numerous irregularities at many levels at state and third-sector level in the process of solving the problem of homelessness making them less effective.
These also concerned shelters. None of the 17 social welfare centres inspected guaranteed homeless people refuge in all four forms prescribed by the social welfare act (hostels, warming centres, homeless shelters and homeless shelters with care services). Ninety-five of 585 districts provided no form of shelter.
There were also situations when welfare centres offered homeless people temporary housing in distant locations. The most extreme example was the centre in Zarszyn in Podkarpackie province, southeast Poland, which provided shelter in Pomerania, 643 kilometres away.
Begging and social exclusion are such individual issues, dependent on the circumstances, that there will never be a simple answer. We often behave in a certain way that we see as the most ethical and responsible, yet our decisions are often dictated by stereotypes and myths about the people begging on the street. These will need to be confronted in order to find lasting solutions.
Translated by Ben Koschalka. Main image credit: Lukasz Krajewski / Agencja Gazeta
