Introduction

Society’s conception that disabled people are unable to be productive is ingrained in the very language ‘dis-abled’. Disabled people are considered to need and deserve charity. And the very stigma that bars disabled people from employment feeds the need to give. Disabled people are assumed to lack productivity by nature of their bodies, henceforth, they are not guilty of being ‘lazy’ for not working. Economically disadvantaged by this productivity stigma, disabled people often have to resort to begging instead of wage labour. Begging on the street means a passer-by may donate in exchange for the feeling of having contributed and met their social obligation. This population is sustained by neither wage labour nor government-sanctioned social protections. As such, workers give, and beggars beg. Supply equals demand.

Individuals often respond to street-beggars through the lenses of pity and contempt. Institutions surrounding street-begging account for this. The financial incentives to spend often rely on public pity. Criminal law surrounding street-begging often exists to manage and distribute public contempt. Institutions surrounding street-begging will be interrogated for their role in explaining the persistence of this livelihood. But due to the complexities of local customs and shifting contexts and response shifting public perceptions over time, I cannot interrogate all of these factors in detail.

There are many reasons that people resort to begging, and I do not want to oversimplify such a complex, nuanced and difficult situation in just a few sentences. I am not going to undertake the endeavour to craft a treatise as to why begging is good or evil, on the part of the beggar or society, that is for others to do. Most particularly, it is for disabled street-beggars to narrate their own stories.

Literature usually treats disabled beggars as numbers, deviants from institutions – people left behind by the economy, rather than an assumed or at least extant part of local economies across the world. As a subclass of unemployed people in functioning economies, unable to participate in formal employment, disabled people often make their livelihood informally. One of those informal mechanisms is begging.

Participating in street begging is not a problem of select individuals or deviance of human nature.