What's the best way of handling a homeless person who's begging?

In January I returned to the city I used to live in for a time and early one Sunday morning I caught a train into the inner city. I was really shocked by the amount of homeless people there were sleeping on the street. Being early the city was empty of shoppers, and there were homeless people sleeping in alcoves, lying on the pavement, curled up in sleeping bags. It was hot, summer in Australia - there was one man, who looked like he was in his seventies, laid out on the pavement, frying in the morning sun. I went up and gave him five dollars, he thanked me and laid back down on the ground. I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't still have the five dollars in his pocket. Sometimes money isn't helpful but I don't have any qualms in giving it a person in need. I went and got him a bottle of water, an apple, a bread roll and a chocolate bar from the corner store. I gave this to him and straight away he started drinking.

I kept walking and came across six or seven more people sleeping rough, so I went and made a heap of kits and just started giving them out. One guy was asleep when I dropped off his kit - I came back past later and he was using the water to brush his teeth.

Another guy I gave a kit to I passed later and found that he had left the apple and the water half drunk, only having eaten the soft roll. Dental hygiene is obviously something to consider, if someone has been living rough a long time they might not be able to tackle an apple, so I switched to bananas.

The city started to fill up and people were walking around the homeless completely ignoring them. I don't know if it's something people become desensitized to or what. There seems to just be this general sense of disgust towards the homeless which is abhorrent. Homeless folk were strewn about the city quietly dying as everyone went about their business.

I've met a lot of people who've lived rough, who've had drug addiction problems. Invariably none of them sought to be homeless or addicted to drugs. Their stories involved gross abuse, neglect, trauma and mental illness. Combine these things and welfare agencies become more difficult to deal with, families begin to lose contact and people fall between the cracks. A study conducted in the UK (2005) reported than homeless people are 13 times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the rest of the public and 47 times more likely to be the victims of theft (reference at end of post, p.3). Most of these crimes are perpetrated by the public on the homeless (same reference, p.4) and yet there is this pervasive attitude that the homeless are perpetrators, that they are bad people or evil people. The homeless are the most vulnerable members of society; they're members of society, they're human - they're victims, people that need to be helped not handled.

All up it cost about ten or fifteen dollars to make six or seven kits. And that it was a really easy thing to do; go to a store, buy the gear, split it up into bags and just go ask people if they'd like some food and water. If they said yes, I gave it to them, wished them all the best, and walked off.

I'm sharing this because I learned from it, most importantly that bottled water is a really good idea both for cleaning and drinking, so is soft food, soft rolls, bananas, oranges. Chocolate bars are a good idea too. I don't think there is anything wrong with giving a person money. There are many uses for money that aren't drugs. Like some other folk have said in the winter, maybe hand out a blanket or two, a sleeping bag or a jacket. I'm sure that's as good a help as any one person can offer; if everyone helped to the extent that it was within their means to, that would make an amazing difference to the quality of the lives of many.

REF:

http://www.radstats.org.uk/no099/Scurfieldetal99.pdf

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