A few days ago, I came across an anti-begging campaign. A bus operated by the Ministry of Social Development stopped, and two staff members got out and approached a child and an adult accompanying him. There was nothing dramatic or unusual about the scene. The child, who appeared to be around 14 or 15, seemed to be trying to convince one of the staff members of something. I could not hear what he was saying, but I followed the scene until the end, when the child and his companion boarded the bus.
In fact, it was one of the rare times I was grateful for a traffic jam. It gave me enough time to follow the scene and took me back to a programme I worked on during my time at Save the Children Jordan, focusing on children in begging situations. One of its key outcomes was an analysis of legal gaps in dealing with children in begging situations, followed by a study focused on listening to children and understanding their needs and asks.
Of the 94 children interviewed for the 2024 study Invisible Children: Voices of Children in Street Situations, 86% had previously been placed in care and rehabilitation centres. Thirty-two per cent had been apprehended two to three times, 19% four to six times, while 15% reported being apprehended more than 15 times.
More recent data points to the same pattern. According to the 2026 policy paper A Generation at Risk: Children’s Vulnerability and Exposure to Drugs in Jordan, published by Analyseize  Research, 4,769 cases involving children in begging situations were recorded in 2025, with around 85% involving repeat cases.
Though care and rehabilitation centres provide shelter, food and a safe space, the numbers show that these centres on their own do not prevent recurrence.
When a child returns to the same environment they came from, without sustained intervention with the child and their family, some of the factors that put them at risk are likely to remain. It is therefore difficult to view repeated cases simply as an individual behaviour issue. Something in the environment the child returns to has not changed.
This is not simply a debate about which model we believe works best. Jordan’s legal framework already allows for a broader approach.
Article 36 of the Juvenile Law starts with understanding the child and their circumstances. It requires an assessment of the child’s situation, family, social environment and health, as well as listening to the child and their parents, guardian, custodian or the person responsible for their care. Article 24 also provides for non-custodial measures, including enrolment in rehabilitation programmes organised by the Ministry or civil society organisations, as well as judicial supervision that allows the child to remain in their natural environment with guidance and follow-up. Article 37 gives the court further options, including placing the child with their parents or caregiver with an obligation to provide appropriate care, referring them to an accredited care institution, or placing them under the supervision of a probation officer.
In other words, institutional care is not the only legal option. There is already a legislative basis for working with children, their families and their communities.
This is where community-based centres can play a role.
The idea is not to create another facility where children are simply received. It is to develop a case-management-based intervention model located close to children and their families and operating over the medium to long term, depending on the needs of each child.
It would begin with an assessment of the child’s situation and the risks around them, and connect the child and family to the services they need: educational support, psychosocial support, protection services, parenting support and follow-up, including economic empowerment opportunities for caregivers where household economic vulnerability contributes to reliance on the child’s income.
If a child contributes to the family income, simply telling them to stop begging will not change the situation. The intervention needs to work with the family itself through home visits, parenting support, risk assessment, and links to training or income-generating opportunities where appropriate.
This model does not mean that institutional care is no longer necessary. Where a child is facing violence, coercion, exploitation, trafficking or immediate danger, removal to a safe environment may be the right intervention. But where it is safe and possible to work with the family, community-based intervention allows us to address risk factors rather than simply removing the child from them temporarily.
Anti-begging campaigns remain necessary, particularly when children are exposed to exploitation or coercion. Holding those who exploit children accountable must also be a core part of the response, and organised or forced begging may amount to trafficking under national legislation.
But we need to distinguish between the person exploiting the child and the child being exploited. Children need protection; they should not themselves become the focus of deterrence.
What stayed with me from the work on Invisible Children: Voices of Children in Street Situations is that many of these children’s needs and asks are clear and actionable: safety, education, support, safer family relationships, and a genuine opportunity to move away from the circumstances that push them onto the streets. Their families, too, need interventions that address their vulnerabilities rather than treating the child as though they exist separately from their family.
It may therefore be time to expand our response from a model centred primarily on apprehension and placement towards a multi-level protection system: immediate protection when needed, institutional care when the home is unsafe, and community-based centres that work with children and their families when circumstances allow.
Most importantly, we are not starting from scratch. We have listened to children and families. We have data showing the scale of recurrence, and years of experience working with these cases.
Perhaps what we need now is to use all of this to design interventions that respond to what children and their families have already told us.