06.08.2014 Stereotypes: Rroma as child robbers

Several British tabloids report on the fate of the Belarusian model Olga Romanovich. The beauty queen was allegedly kidnapped as a four year old from her birth mother in Moldova. The child robbers are termed as gypsies. From these, she was supposedly sold for a pair of gold earrings to another Rroma family that wished to have a daughter in addition to their son: “Her birth mother Tamara fled an abusive husband with Olga and was initially cared for at a railway station by gypsies who persuaded her to move from her home in Belarus to Moldova. She had to beg on the street with her daughter, before she was tricked into giving up her child during a car journey. They stopped at a shop, and gave her money to buy cigarettes, before driving off with her baby who was sold to another gypsy, who lived in the town of Soroki near the Ukrainian border. The woman who bought her had a son but wanted a daughter too, and “bought” Olga for a pair of golden earrings and a tiny sum of money, though she Olga was largely raised by this woman’s mother” (The Huffington Post 2014). The stereotype of Rroma as child robbers reaches back to their arrival in Western Europe. The prejudice is based on the idea that Rroma are deliberately anti-social living groups who steal their livelihood from the hard-working majority population and enrich themselves from them by illegal means. However, Rroma are not more criminal than other ethnic groups. Trafficking of children has nothing to do with the culture of the Rroma, as the articles cited here suggest. It is a racist prejudice that has been handed down for generations (compare Cockroft 2014, Hartley-Parkinson 2014, Metro News 2014, Stewart 2014).