27.08.2014 Stereotypes: Rroma gangs as con artists

Weder (2014) of the Thurgauer Zeitung reports on a “Rroma clan” from Germany that is said to betray unsuspecting mostly elderly people out of tens of thousands of Swiss francs, by offering the cleaning or the sale of oriental rugs at exorbitant prices: “Their appearance is serious, friendly and courteous, their practices are audacious and ruthless. They pretend to be carpet experts, the police searches for them for fraud. They fool unsuspecting people, con huge amounts of money out of them and disappear without a trace. Their trick: they clean old oriental rugs and sell new – for supposedly unbeatable prices. In fact, the carpets are barely worth anything and the quality of the cleaning is more than questionable.” Behind the tricksters one suspects predominantly the “Goman-Clan”, a Rroma family from Leverkusen who is said to be specialised in this activity, as a representative he Canton police St. Gallen confirms. The offenses described here shall not be trivialised. It is a crime which must be punished. However, it is very problematic to explicitly address the ethnicity of the perpetrators and to present it as an explanation for criminal offenses. This suggests that the crimes are a cultural trait of the Rroma. Rroma are not more criminal than other ethnic groups. With this, one defames the majority of the respectable, integrated Rroma, which are not delinquent and one engages in intellectual arson, by sustaining a pejorative view of the minority. Moreover, the notion of hierarchically organised family gangs who commit crimes under the command of a clan chief has to be questioned. The idea of hierarchical family goes back to the false assumption that Rroma have a strictly patriarchal family structure, with clear hierarchies and relationships of dependency. While it is true that the family has an important status among the Rroma, its organisation is largely egalitarian.