Blondes among the darker.
Why assume a crime?
Is the blonde angel Yenish? Maria and Greek Roma.
Update in light of comment, below.
As of 11/2/2013. The child Maria's biological parents have been found in Bulgaria as the Greek Roma family who are raising her, had stated. The identity is confirmed, and no crime appears to have been committed. See http://abcnews.go.com/International/mystery-gypsy-girls-identity-confirmed-dna/story?id=20681522 .
In Ireland as well, no issue remains as to a blond child in a darker family there as well. See http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/23/world/europe/europe-mystery-girls/.
Prejudices betray us, in the absence of facts.
1. An old issue now recurs. Alarms are raised about why darker skinned parents are raising a lighter-skinned child in their nomadic, or once-nomadic, Roma culture. Headlines: the light-skinned child, the blond, blue-eyed one, might have been stolen. Take the child into protective custody, jail the parents! See http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/10/21/greece-mystery-angel-girl-roma-gypsy/3142559/.
Might have been. The fever to feed a stereotype about racial hierarchy rules. No facts first, before painting the ending. The anti-minority mythology, the ancient libel about (once) Jews, and now Gypsies, grows. Another such child has been found in a Roma family in Ireland, see http://world.time.com/2013/10/22/another-blonde-girl-removed-from-roma-family/ The Irish "Tinkers" are Travellers of, I understand, ethnic Irish background, see http://irishtraveller.org.uk/ And look Irish, not of Asian or other dark-skinned descent. Still, smear.
Author Louise Doughty, with many books about Roma and Travellers, has risen to the current issue and called it, when it occurs as in the current fact-free zone, recurrent libel, see http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/22/angel-kidnapped-by-gypsies-libel-replayed
2. Roma or other nomadic groups are not alike. There are blondes like us. See an overview: Open Society Foundation, Voices, History of Gypsies, Roma, Travellers. It has long been known that Travellers in the British Isles and elsewhere in Europe see themselves as separate from "Gypsy" or Roma groups also on the Continent. Are the Travellers' origins Celtic, deep into Europe's own past, and not derivative from a migration from India. Surnames can suggest a Romani past sometimes -- look at the Yenish, for example, in Ancestry.com. Do a Romney and see the variations.
3. Yenish, for example. Who are the fair-skinned nomadic peoples. The Yenish Travellers, are among European nomadic peoples, even if now settled, and the Swiss response to them has been brutal.
3.1 Research.
Read academic papers on the topic, four submitted at the University of Greenwich, and one including specific mention of the tool of accusations of nomadic peoples' child abductions and state persecution responses against them generally (in Switzerland here) at http://www.rae.ac.uk/submissions/ra1.aspx?id=58&type=hei&subid=1917, and all dating in the range of 2003,2004, 2005, 2006.
Find one such paper as a google book, The Role of the Romanies. sections focusing on tales of child abduction and why they often seem to swirl about these wilfully maligned cultures, including the Yenish culture of Switzerland. for example, and other countries. , see Strike fear into hearts: tell tales of child abduction, changelings, and target some group in need of, says the mainstream, control.
3.2. Self-education. The Yenish on film. Listen.
Watch the Yenish in this Yenish film, so titled, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8Z3X7yTiDQ; and another at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkqFB9S-Xok/. Go down the right hand menu for more -- in America, anywhere. I searched for Jeinesche Bond Letzebuerg, listed as the film's originator, and found nothing. Here is a January 2012 long film, Die Letzen Freien Menschen, but in German, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td8chodhYsQ. Music, haunting.
3.3 Read Louise Doughty. Novels help normalize lives. Try Fires in the Dark.
4. Journalists. Study your topic.
This issue of how nations deal with cultures within it is not de minimis, to be swept under traditionally boundaried countries' rugs.
The overall issue is ethical, humanitarian, right to autonomy. Is there such a human right to autonomy, to be able to move about instead of staking out turf? With origins in various mists, and beset by urban legends that serve to rouse the settled against them, how do they defend. Is there a right to assumed innocence? Of course not. And any group builds in survival techniques so they can survive. Can those be defused? The cases do need to be vetted; but why remove a child if the home is safe, minimal adequate care even, and the parents cooperating in place? The stereotypic assumption of guilt in a minority again is frightening.
There is more to nomadic cultures than the one category, Roma, Romani, embraces. Stories recur in European and other history as children of the road, many now halted, caravan families often forced into alien molds of forced settlement. A broad brush paints them as darker skinned, dark hair.
Get us some facts before arousing stereotypes. Knee-jerk police-types. Unless there is harm being done or likely to be done to a child, and so long as a flight risk is not feasible (make it so), leave the child with the parents while you investigate calmly, quietly, and then perhaps tiptoe away while the child sleeps, unaware.
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FN. Associations:
Nomadic peoples in Scandinavia. Are they there?
I did see begging people on our recent improvised road trip (Norway Road Ways), but have no information on ethnicity, or whether they were migrants as any others might be, just that they were dark-skinned. I cannot discern clothing styles with any confidence.
Housing. I saw only one trailer settlement in Norway this year on an improvised road trip. Trailers, mobile homes, in groups, are not commonly visible from the roadside.Are they there? The people in that park were not dark, but I did wonder what purpose it served, construction going on, dirt road in parts, there hidden 'way up on the summit of a moderate mountain at Kvam, a place the sign called the Peer Gynt Trailer Park. Peer Gynt country, of course.
Curiosity, speculation without facts: Are these or were these residents nomadic once and is this a "settlement" by the governmenr? Or is this just senior housing (then why so far away, up a winding road, up up. Is it benevolent low-income housing open to anyone. The people I saw were fair-skinned.
- There are Gypsies in Norway, do a search. In Norwegian, they were called the Sigoynere. In Sweden, the Zigenare. One motivation -- to make money, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MILysXJHr1U/. The narrators here appear to be of darker skin origin, not the Celtic-Teutonic who could blend in more easily physically.
- And the cultural clashes are increasing, see http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/a-gypsy-fiasco-in-oslo/ Roma had, of course, been included in the racial purity slaughters of WWII and before and stigma after, see Long Pursuit of Racial Purity, http://mondediplo.com/1999/10/11/gypsy
