Context Child trafficking and Romani communities On the
BBC News website, Paul Kirby took up the general data on child trafficking activities around Romani communities:
UNICEF estimated that at least 3,000 children in Greece were in the hands of networks originating from Bulgaria, Romania and other
Balkan countries; most cases were probably not the result of abductions, but rather purchases and sales concluded for a few thousand euros. For the international organization, Romani communities were often used by traffickers because they were "below the radar of society". Similarly, the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), while refusing to link the fact to cultural or community factors, acknowledged that the Romani are a vulnerable group, due to their extreme poverty and low levels of income and education. In November 2015, when Christos Salis and Eleftheria Dimopoulou were acquitted of kidnapping charges, the Greek website
Ekathimerini.com recalled that, according to the Ministry of Justice, dozens of cases of child trafficking and illegal adoptions were being investigated, some of which involved doctors and private clinics; among the explanatory factors cited were the low
birth rate and cumbersome adoption procedures.
Romani in Greek society Ermal Bubullima, of the
Courrier des Balkans, noted that the case had led the Greek media to raise the question, usually passed over in silence, of the economic and social situation of the Romani in the country, which he outlined in broad strokes: first appearing in Greece's history in the 11th century, the Romani, now estimated to number around 300,000, often lived in deplorable conditions and suffer multiple forms of discrimination; the Greek NGO
Réseau Rom estimates that 83% of Romani camps had no access to electricity; running water and
sanitation were also rare, and settlements were frequently located on noxious sites, near
slaughterhouses or
landfill sites. In May 2013, Greece, which had already been sanctioned for school segregation in 2008, was condemned (along with the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia) by the
European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for allowing Romani children to be excluded from certain elementary school, and setting up separate schools for them. In October 2014, a year after the affair broke, Nikolia Apostolou, an Athenian writer and filmmaker writing on the
Open Society Foundations website, noted no significant improvement, but rather a strengthening of prejudice. There were signs of progress here and there: in Examilia, near
Corinth, for example, after years of effort, the young players of the Romani soccer team noticed a change in the attitude of the inhabitants of the neighboring town, who now come to watch their matches. But the ten-year program of cooperation with Romani communities, which was supposed to tackle the problems of schooling, health, housing and work, has had trouble finding its way into national and local reality.
Aspects and implications of the administrative situation of the Romani in Europe Speaking to
The Guardian, Zeljko Jovanovic, himself of Romani origin and director of the
Roma Initiative program (an association of the Open Society Foundations network A study carried out in 2012 in eleven European countries also revealed that 90% of Romani families live below the poverty line in their respective countries, and that 15% of them have completed secondary school. website team, the case and, above all, the media coverage it received, should be seen in the context of the political climate surrounding Europe's Romani minorities at the time: since the 2000s, these populations have been the subject of restrictive national measures aimed at their encampment or, in the case of foreigners, their repatriation to their country of origin, most often in
Central and Eastern Europe (Romania, Bulgaria or
Kosovo); France, Germany and Italy are particularly prominent in these policies, which have intensified since 2010, with the French government stepping up its expulsions. in France, in July 2013,
Jean-Marie Le Pen predicted a flood of 12 million Romani, all of whom he saw "in the starting-blocks". But the theme reached a wider
political spectrum. In September 2013, referring to the dismantling of camps, the French Interior Minister, the Socialist
Manuel Valls, declared, "These populations have lifestyles that are extremely different from ours, and which are obviously in confrontation, we have to take that into account, it does mean that the Romani are destined to return to Romania or Bulgaria." The following month, on the subject of opening the borders to Bulgarian and Romanian workers,
David Cameron, the British Conservative
Prime minister, warned: "if people are not here to work — if they are begging or sleeping rough — they will be removed". In the eyes of the specialist in intercultural relations, although they concern different measures, the two speeches communicated the same message about the incompatibility of lifestyles between Romani minorities and what were becoming delicate to call "host societies".
Child protection and "moral panic" In terms of child protection, Jana Hainsworth, from the Eurochild network of associations, has found the case to be an illustration of an all-too-common trend: the demonization of "bad" parents, to the detriment of a more attentive approach to the complexity of families' situations. For Viviene Cree, an academic specializing in social work, who is developing this analysis with Gary Clapton and Mark Smith, the case had all the hallmarks of a "
moral panic": • social actors perceived as a threat to society: in this case, the "child-stealing" Romani; • the media portrayed them in a stylized, stereotyped way: in fact, media coverage of the affair was highly emotional, revealing an underlying racism in the evocation of the "Blond Angel"; • the building of "moral barricades" and the production of diagnoses and solutions by socially recognized experts: in this case, it was the media that fulfilled this role, with associations and child specialists generally refraining from any direct involvement; • evolving methods of treatment, with repercussions that were difficult to control: even before the long-term results of the case could be assessed, it was already possible to point out that, when it comes to social work, "
the road to hell is paved with good intentions". On the website of the Institute of Race Relations, Ryan Erfani-Ghettani reminisced about how the Greek television stations (
Alpha and
Skai) in Farsala exploited family videos and expressions of affection from the neighborhood: to show that the little girl was raised by the whole community with the aim of making money, first through begging, then through the sex trade. Subsequently, due to a reaction of defiance from the camp's inhabitants, the BBC cameras were turned away, leaving the impression that the camp was trying to protect a secret parallel life. For Giannis Mavris, the outcome of the case – the absence of proven criminal activity and little Maria's Romani ancestry – revealed the power of xenophobic stereotypes. However, the press did not look back. Most newspapers opted for silence, and the outcome of the affair was treated with great sobriety. This lack of self-criticism leaves the observer pessimistic about the possibility of restoring confidence in the media in Greece. Krystal Thomas, author of an academic work on the situation of the Romani in the European Union, highlighted how Maria's "mystery", by occupying the headlines, put these populations under the gaze of the rest of the international community: her instant disappearance, without any analysis of the negative stereotypes that had been disseminated, ultimately led to increased discontent. Estrella Israël-Garzón and Ricardo Ángel Pomares-Pastor, respectively professor and researcher in
communication sciences, for their part studied how the affair was covered by the television news of several European public channels (BBC,
France 2,
Rai 1 and
La 1), from October 19 to 22, 2013. The main finding is that the presentation of the news contributed to the stigmatization of the populations involved, notably through an ethnicization of the facts contrary to the quality standards in use. The stigmatization was evident first and foremost in the images presented. Views of the Farsala encampment reveal the group's marginality. In the photographs in which Christos Salis and Eleftheria Dimopoulou are shown with the little girl, they are shown side by side, their gazes parallel, as if they didn't know each other. The front and side portraits of both parents, obviously taken by police officers, criminalize them from the outset. The shots of the child are almost all serious and sad. Two of them, commented Isabelle Ligner on the association website
Dépêches tsiganes, operate in a "before/after" mode: while the first showed her in crumpled tracksuits, her head disheveled and her face dirty, the second, where a smile appears on a clean face topped by a well-coiffed head of hair, suggested how the good treatment lavished on her by the authorities contrasted with the negligence of the Romani couple.) was presented, and reference was made to human rights groups. However, in the majority of cases, the contextual information needed for understanding was lacking. The case was presented as a global news item, according to presentation criteria that did not differ significantly between public and private media. shifted from the search for the authentic progenitors to the ethnic question.
Unity and diversity in European media Daniel Bonvoisin's qualitative observation was similar: most European media were content with a simplistic treatment based on agency dispatches and stereotypes. In his view, their convergence around a relatively uniform theme was indicative of the generalization across the continent of the same image of the Romani, who had become a European-wide reprobate. In his view, this trend was in line with the hardening of political discourse on these minorities: a climate devoid of nuance encouraged the press to relay rumors with a single voice. In Daniel Bonvoisin's view, the magnitude of the affair also provided an ideal opportunity to analyze the media discourse on these populations. He pointed out that it had its origins in a rumor which, like
the one in Orléans, combined the theme of kidnapping with a racist slant: non-Romani children, as evidenced by the color of their hair and eyes, were allegedly kidnapped by Romanis, for whom this was a habitual activity. Thus, by subscribing to the police hypothesis of the kidnapping, a large part of the European press subscribed to the prejudices on which it was based, and the media hype revealed first and foremost the racial background that structures the imaginary world of the Romani.
Reawakening prejudice against Romani children-stealers '', 1902. The "anomaly" constituted by the girl's blond hair was, in the words of Daniel Bonvoisin, "exorcised" by another cliché, that of the child-stealing Romani. As Isabelle Ligner has explained, it was widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was also propagated by the press in a context of repression of "nomadic" populations, considered an integral part of the "dangerous classes". "Don't dawdle in the street, or the flying camps will take you away", was still heard in the provincial France of the 1970s. Anthropologists Marc Bordigoni and Leonardo Piasere pointed out in
Libération that, in this case, the practice of child abduction by the Romani, developed in literature by
Cervantes with the character of
La Petite Gitane, once again proves to be a legend, as it has been for the last century in all cases for which there are records. For them, entrusting one's child to others, whether relatives, allies or strangers, as Maria's biological parents did, is a constant in the history of all populations known to ethnologists, in Europe or elsewhere. According to Isabelle Ligner, in the Romani's broad conception of the family, a child can easily be entrusted informally to an uncle or "ally" of his or her biological parents, and it is common for the same couple to raise both numerous biological children and one or more children through informal adoptions. In the eyes of Marc Bordigoni and Leonardo Piasere, the fate of the little girl, placed in an institution, as well as that of her adopted siblings, also placed, and the similar fate then envisaged for her biological siblings, all illustrated the same reality: in practice, it is the reinforced institutional control of family life, established in Europe from the 19th century onwards, that results in the removal of children from their family environment, "for their own good". The cases of
The Children of Creuse, from 1963 to 1982 in France, and the "
Children of the Open Road", from 1926 to 1973 in Switzerland, provide two examples. highlighted the irony of the situation of little Maria, taken away from her family because it was feared that she had been abducted, while the last century was marked, "from the British Isles to the Americas, from France to Spain, from Romania to Russia, from Australia to South Africa", by the forced removal of Romani children from their families. The case showed once again that Romani motherhood is never safe, always open to challenge. As with the other blonde angels, the author saw the treatment of Maria's case as an expression of a rejection of Romani motherhood that points to a wider project, "involving the criticism of Romani mothers, the dismantling of Romani family structures, the destabilization of Romani children".
Forced sterilization in the
Czech Republic, school segregation in Hungary, police operations – evictions, raids, dismantling – carried out in Romani neighborhoods in Greece, Germany and France have placed the Romani, their families and their communities in a situation of permanent insecurity.
Femininity, forms of motherhood and Romani mothers themselves are delegitimized, even though it is through them that children learn the language and become individuals and members of the Romani community. In the face of these threats, the author called for a Romani
feminism which, unlike liberal conceptions, can only be rooted in the community's resistance. == Notes ==