Juvenile begging cases nearly cut in half in 2022  — Social Development Ministry

AMMAN — The numbers of juveniles involved in begging nearly halved in 2022, according to the Ministry of Social Development. 

Compared with 2021, during which 7,981 juvenile beggars were arrested, 2022 witnessed 4,084 individual juveniles in begging cases, according to a ministry statement made available to The Jordan Times.

During 2022, a total of 11,261 were arrested for begging across the Kingdom, while in the 2021, a total of 13,558 were arrested, according to the ministry's spokesperson Ashraf Khreis.

Speaking with The Jordan Times, Director of the Anti-Vagrancy Department at the Ministry of Social Development Maher Kloub said that the ministry immediately refers juvenile beggars to the juvenile court as per the law.

“The ministry works continuously to mitigate this through the department’s anti-vagrancy campaigns,” he added.

“There are a bunch of children begging near my house, and a couple of times I even saw a car coming to pick them up,” Um Ghaith, a Jordanian living in the Marj Al Hamam area, told The Jordan Times. 

Um Ghaith said that the solution lies in the arrest of “organised begging gangs,” noting that this would solve “a major part of the vagrancy phenomenon”. 

Vagrancy cases can be reported to the ministry by contacting 0780777660, 0790777660, or 0770044033 via WhatsApp.