Every Gypsy kid from that group would be found to be in state of neglect. They are very poor and their kids are unkempt. Plus, these people, separated from most of society via their culture and repression, for hundreds of years, (almost none of these people have an education), are still where we were in the 1800's - poor children begin working young, they don't have Romani child labor laws, everyone marries young and they all die young.
That's the situation with these people. They are far different from an average Greek person or child. It's like a mini-third world nation in the middle of the industrialized West.
If we grabbed a random kid from Brooklyn, in 1908, the kid would likely be similar to the state of most of these children. This particular group of Gypsies has not evolved, overall. The reasons are complex and not all of it is due to their own actions or lack thereof. Many who try to break in to the larger society, by getting an education and trying to find honest work, are just denied. If these are Romanian Gypsies, for example, they come from one of the most repressive dictatorships in contemporary European history. And Gypsies were especially repressed and brutalized under Nicolae Ceaușescu. It's hard to come back from that and they remain incredibly hated back home.
I don't condone or excuse the exploitation of children, but it's often not that black or white. There are reasons that are not mired in evil, even thought those reasons are not justification.
I agree with you. My only experience of any similar group is wiht a traveller community in Oxfordshire, and that is because the women began to want to learn about child care and work as creche workers, and I taught them. Their children also went to my children's school.
What became very obvious to me, was that child rearing pracitces were different and that the priorities for raising a child were different: the children did often look unkempt, and they did shout a lot where older boys were concerned. However, there was a definite reason to what the community did, and different expectations of what women would do.
One of the women was very intelligent and able to explain a lot of their way of life not just to me, but the whole class and the women that identified most were Asian.
I have been concerned all along that things may not be right, but may also be perceived differently from how they are by the authorities.
This particular culture may have a way of not telling the truth to any authority figure ingrained into it. It may be there IS an explanation for things but that because it is ingrained you never tell an outsider what the truth is that much of the problem stems from the initial interview. Hence the discrepancies.
The other thing that has me concerned it that at college I had a friend from Italy. She was Italian, from a good Italian family and she was pale, white blonde. I remember me expressing my surprise and her telling me that while it was not common, there were others with a similar colouring to her own. Thinkng of the man she eventually married, those children may also have been born in Greece and were likely blonde.
The way the woman treats the older boy is not dissimilar from how I have seen the traveller parents i got to know treat their boys in the school playground, but they certainly loved them. When we talked about it, they said the children would not respond to anything else.
I was pretty sure of some petty thieving and so on, and the lady I spoke about above would clearly know, be annoyed with them, but deny it with a sort of twinkle in her eye, but I would get the impression there was hell to pay for the person involved when she got home. She also explained a lot about the marriages, as this, (and food,) was the top topic apart from children.
That there was what we call dishonesty, does not mean the children of that community, dirty and unkempt as they were (have you tried living an outside life with children and keeping them clean? Take that and put in a level of ignorance about hygeine and you can see how it happens,) were in fact, loved.
We also need to factor in the tendency of Roma people (I assume, ) like the Travellers here (Travellers and Roma are different, but in the UK all are now called Travellery and you do not hear the term, Gypsy.) to go to different places for gatherings at different times of the year. It made it hard to teach a set course for a term, and it made it hard to know who would be in your class from week to week and it stops some kids from getting an education, and that cousins would often turn up with children I knew as a result, you can see how there might be a lot of kids with one family that are not directly their own.
In the classroom I witnessed some clear but unconscious prejudice on the part of a teacher towards a child of that community which quite shocked me as the teacher was unaware she was picking on the child to such a degree.
I think my real worry is that there is a legitimate explanation, that there may be some irregularity, and that the child has been torn from what she knows and possibly with the language barrier has no idea what is going on and it terrified of who she will now see as her captors.
I just hope that the authorities who already have a prejudice against the Roma, have the common sense to use someone with a strong knowledge of the culture and that they quickly sort out for all these children what happened.
Lack of understanding of culture can make for some BIG mistakes. I know a lady here in the UK who comes from a part of the world where it is considered love for all the family to sleep together in the same room. It is considered terrible to sleep alone. Social services had a field day because some ignorant social worker did not bother to do a bit of research. Fortunately the end result was that the woman trained in childcare and began to teach us all........
