"We ask the media to act responsibly in reporting this"
By DAMIAN LE BAS
Editor
Above: in an interview for BBC News, Romani journalist and former Travellers' Times editor Jake Bowers said "the shock there is in the media is that this child, a blonde child, is being raised in a poverty-stricken, destitute environment. Yet there is no shock and there is no horror about the fact that there are millions of Romani children across Europe that live in ghettos, that live far below the European poverty line"
THE European Roma Rights Centre has urged the media to consider its responsibilities as the hysteria over Romani people, blonde children and abduction continues to grow out of control.
In a statement issued yesterday, the ERRC said that it was"concerned by increasing reports of children being removed from Roma families, following reports about a child taken from her home in a Romani settlement in Greece. Another child has since been removed from her home in Ireland, according to media reports.
"We ask the media to act responsibly in reporting the situation, especially as the full facts of the original case have still not been established," they added.
Picture: following global coverage of the story of Maria, above, who was living with a family of Greek Roma, a blonde child has also been removed from a Roma family in Dublin by the Gardai (Irish police)
Amidst the frenzied newspaper and television response to these isolated cases, Romany journalist and former Travellers' Times editor Jake Bowers was interviewed on a number of programmes, including BBC News, regarding the outcry. He said that he was worried the alleged abduction scandal would fuel "yet another stereotype that Romani people will be beaten with.
"It's astounding the way that it's been reported, that there's a shock and horror that a blonde child has been found within a Romani community. It's amazing because I'm blonde, I'm blue eyed, I'm from the Roma community, and there are blonde and blue eyed people throughout the Romani community."
He continued: "But the shock there is in the media is that this child, a blonde child, is being raised in a poverty-stricken, destitute environment. Yet there is no shock and there is no horror about the fact that there are millions of Romani children across Europe that live in ghettos, that live far below the European poverty line, and that receives no media coverage at all."
The ERRC also mentioned reports from Serbia, where skinheads reccently tried to take away a two-year old boy from his family because he was "not as dark as his parents". Irresponsible reporting could have severe, negative consequences for Roma families across Europe, according to the ERRC.
"If a crime has been committed in Greece, and this is still by no means clear, those who committed it should be treated as individuals, not as representatives of their ethnicity. Such a case could arise in any racial, ethnic, religious or national group," they said.
Reports also came in of police in Ireland removing another child, also purported to have blonde hair, from a Dublin-based Romani family to test her DNA and check her parentage. Current Travellers' Times editor Damian Le Bas spoke to journalists about the strangeness of the sudden media obsession with blonde children and Romani families, given that the global Romani community numbers at least 10 million- the population of a small to medium-sized country- and hundreds of thousands of them have blonde hair.
Speaking to the Australian Telegraph he referred to photographs of himself as a blonde child in a Gypsy family: should the police have intervened and removed him from his relatives to check his DNA?
"This public hysteria not only draws on a centuries-old racial myth that Gypsies steal children, but also carries sickening echoes of the Nazi idea that there is a clear line to be drawn between the racially unclean Gypsies and the superior white people of Europe. This kind of thinking led directly to the murder of up to one and a half million Romani people during World War Two, and yet the media shows no interest in referring to that," he said.
Above: Travellers' Times editor Damian Le Bas referred journalists to a picture of himself being held by his great grandmother as a three-year-old, and asked whether they thought police should have intervened when they saw a Romany woman holding a small blonde child
The ERRC added that "Criminality is not related to ethnicity. Roma children are, however, much more likely to be put into state care, trapped in segregated education, and forcibly evicted from their homes. These are the stories that don’t make it to the front page. We urge restraint, and we urge all local authorities, media outlets and other stakeholders to fully examine the facts before acting."
For more information about the European Roma Rights Centre and the press release quoted from above, please contact For more information, contact:
Sinan Gökçen
Media and Communications Officer
European Roma Rights Centre
Tel. +36.30.500.1324