Unemployed and homeless in Rome. |
The picture of the “stolen” blonde girl in dirt-caked
tresses was printed and broadcast across Europe, stirring up an old specter:
gypsies steal children to exploit and sell. Greek headlines were explicit:
“Roma Steal Children” and “Amber Alert: Roma Circuit Snatch Babies.” In the
media frenzy following the Greek case, in Ireland, authorities in different
parts of the country took a fair-haired 7 year-old girl and a blond 2 year-old
boy from traveler parents, the cases are unrelated, except in racism, only to
return them both after dna tests showed –unlike in the Greek case-that they
were indeed their gypsy parents’ biological offspring.
Living on the water's edge in Rome. |
Europe’s fear and loathing of gypsies –known variously
across Europe as Rom or Roma or Sinti, or Travelers– is very old and very
bitter. It is part of a broader resentment and mistrust of immigrants and
outsiders, a rejection that has begun to boil over with the economic crisis and
that has been stoked by xenophobic politicians. Immigrant groups across Europe,
are profiled by police, discriminated against in housing, and denied social
services and benefits. But none, perhaps, are targeted as consistently and
shamefacedly as the gypsies. Swedish police keep a file on all gypsies that
enter the country. Hungary and the Czech Republic have been found guilty, in
the European court of Justice, of denying low-income housing to gypsies and
segregating their children in school.
Greek police routinely conduct sweeps of gypsy camps to find what they
can find. It was in one of these that the blonde girl was discovered.
But this particular outbreak of racist hysteria has
undoubtedly been fed and exacerbated by incompetent reporting and the bad
habits of Europe’s media.
Living under a bridge in Rome. |
First, there is very little, if any, fact checking of
stories. Articles are self-checked with very little editorial assistance or
support. Second, there is a pernicious reliance on single sources for stories,
with little effort to include a second view or version of events. This is
particularly evident when dealing with government authorities. In the Greek
girl’s case, the police put out a press bulletin, which was repeated by the
press, with speculative elaboration, but without questioning the police
interpretation or incorporating other voices. Third, there is a preference in
European journalism, including crime reporting, for full narratives, where the
blanks of what we don’t know are backfilled by “informed” speculation to
provide a more complete and compelling story. Combined with an almost total lack
of attribution or sourcing for information, this “fly-on-the-wall” reporting
makes for a good read but abysmal journalism. Again, in the Greek girl case,
none of the deeply flawed assumptions (that gypsies could not have fair
children, that therefore the child was stolen, and that this formed part of a shadowy
criminal conspiracy) were questioned by the media. Instead, they were
reiterated, and elaborated, and magnified.
In the end, the international attention did serve to
identify the biological mother of the Greek girl. She was a gypsy living in
Bulgaria. She voluntarily gave the child to the couple arrested in Greece, she
said, because she could not provide for her 10 children.
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