A police photograph took over the news last week: a tiny girl sitting between her parents, all of them staring blankly into the camera. It is not a flattering picture: the man and woman seem tired,old and dead-eyed, and the little girl looks squeezed uncomfortably between them, with questioning eyes and tangled hair – like a dishevelled version of Maddie McCann. But none of this would have ever sparked anyone’s interest, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the little girl looks white, and her parents brown. Something has got to be wrong with this picture!
Or so the Greek police must have thought, when they found this family in a Roma camp they were raiding. In this environment, being a pale-skinned child that cannot speak Greek is deemed suspicious and reason enough to take her away and submit her to DNA testing. The results seemed to confirm the fears: Maria and her supposed parents were not related, ergo, she must have been abducted. The media was quick to conclude: “Once again”, those criminal vagabond gypsies had stolen a white child! The police, the charity organization responsible for Maria, and the news media started frantically searching for her parents. Where could they be found? Scandinavia was suggested as Maria’s likely origin, because, well, look at her!
In the process of searching for Maria’s real parents, more Roma families came under suspicion. Two children in Ireland were taken away from their families to undergo DNA testing in order to prove that they were not, in fact, victims of a terrible crime. Both children have since been returned to their families, at least one of them on the grounds that her guardians were her biological parents after all. Later that week, Maria’s parents could finally be located. However, they were not Marit and Leif Svensson from Sweden, but Sasha and Atanas Ruseva, a Roma couple from Bulgaria, who gave up their child four years ago because they were too poor to care for her.
romani woman with nazi police officers, via wikipedia
The racist myth of the gypsy child abductors turned out to be nothing but a myth after all. But make no mistake, children are taken away and removed from their safe and familiar homes in Europe all the time. But I am not talking about the Maddie McCanns, whose disappearance is a terrible tragedy. I’m not even talking about the Roma boys and girls that were taken away from their parents because they happened to look different, namely white, and thus were deemed worthy of “protection”. I am talking about the Leonarda Dibranis.
Leonarda Dibrani, a 15-year-old of Roma origin living in France, was ordered off a school bus during a school trip and deported to Kosovo, after her parents failed to receive political refugee status. Following protests by her fellow students, French President Fançois Hollande granted her permission to return to France to finish her education – but she would have to do so without her family.
This is just plain cruel: first, you are forced to leave your friends and your known surroundings to be taken to an environment that is inhospitable to you and your family. Then, you are presented with a Sophie’s choice: to go home without your family, or stay in a poverty-stricken country that you’ve never been to before!
However, while the situation of Maria, the “blonde angel”, has sparked outrage and anger, fueling the hatred towards an already persecuted community, the majority of the French would be perfectly happy for Leonarda to stay away from France and remain in an essentially dangerous living situation (since being moved to the Kosovo, Leonarda’s family has been attacked repeatedly). Maria’s foster parents were accused of neglecting her and not caring for her well-being, but Leonarda and her siblings’ living conditions simply do not matter. This shows how deep racial bias runs.
So who are the real child abusers? The Roma families, who sometimes use dubious methods to get by in a system that has stacked all the odds against them? Or the facilitators of a deeply racist society: governments that favor national interests over human rights, and media outlets looking for easy headlines that feed the people’s ressentiment?
disciplineandanarchy.wordpress.com 
Pingback: Mädchenmannschaft » Blog Archive » Lesben und Schwule in Ostberlin, Rassismus zu Halloween, Klage gegen Karl Lagerfeld – kurz verlinkt
I’m wondering if you have ever come into contact with any Roma families. As a Greek, who has spent years living in a country with Roma families, these “persecuted” people are not as “persecuted” as you make them out to be. Have you ever seen how Roma mothers allow their children to wander midday in the middle of intersections in Athens begging for me while they sit in tents lined along the beach? This is not simply a black and white issue here; it’s a systemic issue of a subculture that has a long and complicated history in both these countries and the ways in which they care for and raise their children–because they are living under the jurisdiction of these countries, they need to abide by the countries laws, and sorry, getting kids “in dubious manners” is not abiding by the laws. So, as someone who has lived among Roma families and seen their children, wandering without shoes, filthy, and tired in the Athens heat, please think twice about jumping to conclusions that this is a racist issue–it’s more of a cultural issue than a racist one.
I’m sorry, but I really don’t understand your comment at all. A lot of Roma families are sending their children to school, like Leonarda Dibrani, who was then deported to a country where most likely she and her siblings will live in poverty, will not be able to go to school and will likely have to beg to make a living. The Irish families I mentioned just minded their own business, they had done nothing wrong other than giving birth to children who happened to look different from them. That is what I have been writing about, but you don’t refer to any of that. Nowhere am I saying that I think children living in the streets are a good thing. I’m glad you are so concerned with the Roma children you saw in Greece, but by ruling out the racist implications I’m afraid you’re not helping in any way. You’re just accusing Roma of being poor, rather than acknowledging that they face discrimination when applying for jobs, housing, schools. That their camps are routinely destroyed, bulldozed. That they often don’t abide by a country’s law, because no country in Europe wants to even grant them any legal status. I agree that the issue is complicated, but by making it all about culture, you’re drastically simplifying and arguing with that same populist notion that “the Roma simply can’t be integrated”.