Why gypsy steal

But here they could be stolen, and I couldn't live with that 8. Frequently also, Italian authorities "monitor" Romani families, conducting surveillance to ascertain child-rearing practices and render judgement on them. The standard fine for truancy is , Italian lira around euros. It is a fine for minors under sixteen caught out of school during attendance hours.

A notice is given to the truant child, and the fine sent to the parents' address. This information comes from the Child Welfare Office in Rome 9. The same official at the Child Welfare Office also confirmed that 25 Romani families in Rome are under surveillance for their children's truancy and risk having their children taken into state custody.

The official, who would not give his name, was adamant about the difference between "Gypsies and Italians…the same laws do not work for both. These are decisions made by the local government. According to the the Child Welfare Office of the Social Services Department of the Naples municipality, Romani children from various camps are "under observation" to monitor their living conditions and determine whether they should be taken into state custody The "white car" the Child Welfare Office vehicle used to pick up children targeted for state custody has come to symbolise a parent's worst fears of losing a child to the system.

Government spokespersons assert that removing Romani children from Romani families and other paternalistic, disruptive and invasive practices are for the good of Roma. According to some public officials, a practice such as stripping minors from their natural parents is a necessary action to save Romani children from a dismal future Mr Luigi Lusi, Counselor for Nomad Affairs, has offered his solution to what he sees as a fundamental problem of "Gypsies".

City officials will monitor individual Roma to ensure compliance with the law. Children who miss school, according to Mr Lusi, are doing so because they are out "stealing and pickpocketing on the streets Mr Slatko B. As he pointed out, foster family costs , Italian lira approximately euros per month for every child they host; city detention centres spend , Italian lira around 60 euros per day and juvenile prisons spend , Italian lira around euros a day per inmate.

Romani children placed in surrogate families are often traumatised by the experience. Counselling to assist these families must be sought independently. Having fled Romania after racist attacks exploded in his hometown of Craiova, Romania in the early s, he and his wife settled in Rome to find ethnic tension and segregation. Now Mr Dumitru has seen his family life painfully disrupted. There were also camps called Zigeunerlager that were intended just for the Roma population.

It is estimated that up to , Roma died in the Holocaust. For centuries, stereotypes and prejudices have had a negative impact on the understanding of Roma culture, according to the Romani Project. Also, because the Roma people live scattered among other populations in many different regions, their ethnic culture has been influenced by interaction with the culture of their surrounding population.

Nevertheless, there are some unique and special aspects to Romani culture. The Roma do not follow a single faith; rather, they often adopt the predominant religion of the country where they are living, according to Open Society, and describe themselves as "many stars scattered in the sight of God.

The Roma live by a complex set of rules that govern things such as cleanliness, purity, respect, honor and justice. These rules are referred to as what is "Rromano. Some Romani words have been borrowed by English speakers, including "pal" brother and "lollipop" from lolo-phabai-cosh, red apple on a stick. Traditionally, anywhere from 10 to several hundred extended families form bands, or kumpanias, which travel together in caravans.

Smaller alliances, called vitsas, are formed within the bands and are made up of families who are brought together through common ancestry. Each band is led by a voivode, who is elected for life.

This person is their chieftain. In some groups, the elders resolve conflicts and administer punishment, which is based upon the concept of honor. Punishment can mean a loss of reputation and at worst expulsion from the community, according to the RSG.

In fact throughout history and into the modern day it has usually gone the other way around, with Romani children being taken away from their families by the state to try and erase their ethnic identity through assimilation.

A European Roma Rights Centre ERRC report from shows that Romani and Traveller children in England are three times more likely to be taken from their families and put into care than any other child.

In Italy, Roma were driven from an area of Naples in by an angry mob using molotov cocktails after rumours circulated they had stolen a six-month-old baby. In , a blond, fair-skinned blue-eyed Romani child in Greece was assumed to have been kidnapped by Roma and her guardians were arrested. The little girl was still taken into state care though, as were five of her siblings. The real damage was done by the media however, and fake cases of Gypsy child snatching popped up all over Europe. Shortly after the Maria case a little girl and a little boy were taken away from their families in Ireland for DNA testing amidst fear that they had been snatched by Roma.

More recently, attacks on Romani communities erupted in Paris this year after rumours of Roma in white vans stealing children circulated on social media.

This is a favourite of keyboard racists who often recount a time when a Romani person was involved in a violent altercation with them, or someone they know, or someone they heard about once down the pub. From Bulgaria to Bristol , stories abound of Romani and Traveller people brutally attacking members of the public, invariably in headlines splashed across tabloid papers. Often incidents of individual violence are the preface to mob violence and collective punishment against entire Romani communities.

Romani and Traveller people are sometimes violent, but no more or less so than any other type of people. There is a tendency, reinforced by biased reporting, to see Romani people as criminals rather than victims. On Monday, the Sun announced "victory" for the 52, readers who supported its "Britain Has Had Enough" campaign to rid the nation of Gypsy beggars. Gypsies have always excited hatred in the press. For hundreds of years they have played a small but lively part in the European imagination, and these days, when so much of public discourse is deadened by euphemism, Gypsies are perhaps the last group up for grabs.

Is the beggar named as Maria Nistor going to complain when a reporter - the Sun again - claims that she has named her baby "Lucifer"?

These familiar strangers are regarded monolithically; their given name is a synonym for thieves and cheats. As beggars and as Gypsies they are now also emblematic of all asylum seekers: beggars and presumed cheats at the gate of the west. But it is readers who are being "gypped". For in page after page of pious press coverage, myth has displaced history and opinion has displaced fact - facts either about their circumstances or about immigration policy.

I haven't seen any accounts of the trauma of the trip over: about the terror of being dumped, or sexually assaulted, by the paid trafficker; about the constant fear of rejection and attack which is compounded immeasurably where there are children involved. For all the fresh outrage, the story is not new.

In , I met a group of Romanian Gypsies as they prepared to wade across a river into Germany. By the time I caught up with them, this family of four adults, five children and two babies had crossed three borders and more than a thousand miles, in slippers. What I saw in their faces does not tally with the touted image of Romanian Gypsies arriving by the lorryload, happy as Heidis on a hayride.

And where are the reports about the situation in Romania now? Or are we supposed to imagine that there are people prepared to uproot themselves and their small ones, with maximum uncertainty and danger, on a whim? Nor is there any talk of how dramatically immigration policy has shifted in Britain and throughout the European Union: of how, since the s, important distinctions between asylum seekers and other kinds of deserving migrants have been eroded, so that, for the first time in our modern history and in pitiful contrast to the benevolent policies of the post-war period , the low immigration targets set by governments have taken priority and influenced the assessment of would-be immigrants from the poorer world.

In other words, the question of "need" is no longer about them and theirs, it's about us and ours. The barbaric feel of many recent reports has much to do with ignorance - both genuine and wilful: the easiest way to dehumanise people is to strip them of any context, of any history.

And, with very little in the way of a written history of their own, with no book, no anthem, no flag or popular story about the founding of their nation; with no state or power of any kind except in numbers, the Gypsies are particularly vulnerable to such mythologising. The centre-piece of the current story, and its proud centerpiece, is the assertion that Gypsies despise their own children - the flipside of the old favourite that they steal other people's babies - and cynically use them as "props".

Here is what I know about Gypsies and their babies, gleaned from many years of study, predominantly in eastern and central Europe.