Child trafficking and Romani communities

On the BBC News website, Paul Kirby took up the general data on child trafficking activities around Romani communities: UNICEF estimated that at least 3,000 children in Greece were in the hands of networks originating from Bulgaria, Romania and other Balkan countries; most cases were probably not the result of abductions, but rather purchases and sales concluded for a few thousand euros. For the international organization, Romani communities were often used by traffickers because they were "below the radar of society". Similarly, the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), while refusing to link the fact to cultural or community factors, acknowledged that the Romani are a vulnerable group, due to their extreme poverty and low levels of income and education.^[8]

Vincent Vantighem, on the website of the French edition of the free daily 20 minutes, summarized the precedents that guided the early stages of the investigation: in 2011, at the height of child trafficking between Bulgaria and Greece, police cooperation between the two countries led to the arrest of ten Bulgarians and two Greeks, accused of taking 17 pregnant Bulgarian women to Greece to sell their newborn babies. According to experts, operations of this type were facilitated by loopholes in Greek adoption legislation, particularly concerning foreign children. According to police sources, intermediaries earn between 15,000 and 20,000 euros per child.^[6] In September 2014, while Maria Roussev's parents were still suspected of having sold their daughter, Clémentine Fitaire, on the Aufeminin website, made the connection with a new case of child trafficking that the Greek police had just announced had been dismantled: six individuals, including a pediatrician and a notary, were bringing pregnant women in precarious situations from Bulgaria to Greece, to give birth; the babies were then resold to couples applying for adoption, for around 10,000 euros.^[32] In November 2015, when Christos Salis and Eleftheria Dimopoulou were acquitted of kidnapping charges, the Greek website Ekathimerini.com recalled that, according to the Ministry of Justice, dozens of cases of child trafficking and illegal adoptions were being investigated, some of which involved doctors and private clinics; among the explanatory factors cited were the low birth rate and cumbersome adoption procedures.^[33]

Romani in Greek society

Ermal Bubullima, of the Courrier des Balkans, noted that the case had led the Greek media to raise the question, usually passed over in silence, of the economic and social situation of the Romani in the country, which he outlined in broad strokes: first appearing in Greece's history in the 11th century, the Romani, now estimated to number around 300,000, often lived in deplorable conditions and suffer multiple forms of discrimination; the Greek NGO Réseau Rom estimates that 83% of Romani camps had no access to electricity; running water and sanitation were also rare, and settlements were frequently located on noxious sites, near slaughterhouses or landfill sites. In May 2013, Greece, which had already been sanctioned for school segregation in 2008, was condemned (along with the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia) by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for allowing Romani children to be excluded from certain elementary school, and setting up separate schools for them.^[25]

On the news and opinion website Equal Times, Katerina Penna recounted how the Greek economic crisis and its aftermath had intensified backlash against minorities and migrants. Faced with disproportionate levels of unemployment and growing discrimination, the Romani are easily blamed for crime, underemployment and instability. Their situation was further worsened by the progress of the far-right Golden Dawn party, which often violently attacked them.^[34]

In October 2014, a year after the affair broke, Nikolia Apostolou, an Athenian writer and filmmaker writing on the Open Society Foundations website, noted no significant improvement, but rather a strengthening of prejudice. There were signs of progress here and there: in Examilia, near Corinth, for example, after years of effort, the young players of the Romani soccer team noticed a change in the attitude of the inhabitants of the neighboring town, who now come to watch their matches. But the ten-year program of cooperation with Romani communities, which was supposed to tackle the problems of schooling, health, housing and work, has had trouble finding its way into national and local reality.^[35]

Aspects and implications of the administrative situation of the Romani in Europe

Speaking to The Guardian, Zeljko Jovanovic, himself of Romani origin and director of the Roma Initiative program (an association of the Open Society Foundations network^[13]), pointed out that, due to malnutrition and poor housing and hygiene conditions, the 12 million or so Romani living in Europe have a life expectancy 10 years lower on average than the rest of the population.^[36] A study carried out in 2012 in eleven European countries also revealed that 90% of Romani families live below the poverty line in their respective countries, and that 15% of them have completed secondary school.^[35] In the eyes of the association leader, the absence of a valid birth certificate and papers for Maria illustrated a major cause of this situation of exclusion: the lack of official documents. The resulting "official invisibility" excluded Romani not only from the protection of the law, but also from medical care, schooling, job-seeking and participation in elections.^[36]

As Paul Kirby has pointed out, since the mid-1990s, the European Union has been seeking to achieve the full registration of all Romani across Europe. 95% of them are settled, so the operation does not in principle raise any particular administrative problems. However, despite all efforts to register them in national databases, many Romani families continue to fall outside the system.^[8]

According to the picture painted by Zeljko Jovanovic, no European country has precise official statistics on the Romani population; many Romani do not have a birth certificate, as they fail to declare themselves, and the cost of the document is sometimes prohibitive; some avoid declaring their identity for fear of discrimination: the hundreds of thousands of victims of Nazism remain a vivid memory in the community, and present fears are not always imaginary (for example, the Swedish police have maintained an illegal list of 4,000 Romani). Added to this are the legal and procedural difficulties which, according to the association leader, often and deliberately prevent people from obtaining identity documents: in his view, they show that the invisibility of the Romani is politically and economically convenient for governments which would otherwise have to guarantee their access to education, health, justice, representation in the civil service, participation in elections, etc. Lack of official identity makes them easier victims of human trafficking or judicial dysfunction, and often subjects them to the risk of being considered stateless.^[36]

Direction of political measures and discourse on the Romani in European countries

For Daniel Bonvoisin, a member of the Média Animation^[37] website team, the case and, above all, the media coverage it received, should be seen in the context of the political climate surrounding Europe's Romani minorities at the time: since the 2000s, these populations have been the subject of restrictive national measures aimed at their encampment or, in the case of foreigners, their repatriation to their country of origin, most often in Central and Eastern Europe (Romania, Bulgaria or Kosovo); France, Germany and Italy are particularly prominent in these policies, which have intensified since 2010, with the French government stepping up its expulsions.^[5]

According to this analysis, the origin of this situation can be traced back to the accession to the European Union of the countries in the central and eastern part of the continent: this made their Romani nationals fully-fledged European citizens, who were supposed to be able to enjoy the freedom of movement that is at the heart of the Union. In 2013, tensions were heightened as the end of the restrictions imposed on Romania and Bulgaria's integration into the Schengen Area, scheduled for 2014, approached. Added to the general mistrust of these countries' ability to control their migratory flows is concern about the Romani.^[5]

Daniel Bonvoisin has noted that there is much rhetoric in favor of strengthening control policies, without always avoiding clichés. The far right was no stranger to this:^[5] in Hungary, in 2011, journalist Ferenc Szaniszló compared the Romani to monkeys, though this did not prevent him from subsequently being decorated by Viktor Orbán's government;^[38] in France, in July 2013, Jean-Marie Le Pen predicted a flood of 12 million Romani, all of whom he saw "in the starting-blocks".^[39] But the theme reached a wider political spectrum. In September 2013, referring to the dismantling of camps, the French Interior Minister, the Socialist Manuel Valls, declared, "These populations have lifestyles that are extremely different from ours, and which are obviously in confrontation, we have to take that into account, it does mean that the Romani are destined to return to Romania or Bulgaria." The following month, on the subject of opening the borders to Bulgarian and Romanian workers, David Cameron, the British Conservative Prime minister, warned: "if people are not here to work — if they are begging or sleeping rough — they will be removed". In the eyes of the specialist in intercultural relations, although they concern different measures, the two speeches communicated the same message about the incompatibility of lifestyles between Romani minorities and what were becoming delicate to call "host societies".^[5]

Beyond the immediate context, writer Patrick McGuinness saw in this attitude of hostility, in this "passive-aggressive logic", the expression of a point common to all countries, whether in the West or East of the continent, where the Romani constitute a significant minority: failing to identify with a territory, they seem to question the very idea of national identity, setting in motion a game of mutual exclusion in which the majority cultures, in order to justify rejecting them, presume to be rejected by them.^[40]

Reasons for the media frenzy

Daniel Bonvoisin's assessment of the media coverage of the case was less remarkable for its content than for its scale: the almost unanimous interest shown by the continent's media was exceptional for a news item concerning the Romani.^[5] The French news website Le Huffington Post, seeking to identify the reasons for this hype, first noted the mystery in which the investigation began. On October 19, speaking to the press, the regional police spokesman mentioned several possibilities: abduction from a hospital, as the result of an isolated act or as part of a trafficking operation, abandonment by a single mother. In addition to the multiplicity of hypotheses put forward by the investigators, there was also the multiplicity and obscurity of the versions successively provided by the suspect couple. One of these, attributing a Canadian origin to the child, also led to the involvement of the North American media.^[1]

For Jean-Laurent Van Lint, of the weekly Moustique, fascination with the case is also fueled by the image of "threatened purity" conveyed by the figure of the "blond angel", an image behind which unfolds "in filigree the story of a little Aryan girl in the clutches of a barbaric race". According to the journalist, this drift, whether conscious or not, often combined with a sense of misery to frame the case against the Romani, makes the whole affair seem like a "Dickensian novel".^[10] In Daniel Bonvoisin's view, these images, and more generally the "imaginary of the Romani", were the driving force behind media discourse. As he noted, clichés remained at the heart of the discourse, even in texts that aim to deconstruct them and denounce their stigmatizing dimension. In his view, the media's treatment of this issue was conditioned by a European discourse that was largely suspicious of the Romani, and the magnitude of the affair shows just how powerfully the media can be driven by prevailing representations of a minority, coupled with a specific political climate towards it.^[5]

Analyses all agreed on the emotional effectiveness of the "lost child" theme. Among the calls to the "The Smile of the Child" association were those from parents who have lost theirs, and for whom this is a moment of hope.^[1] For example, for Ben Needham's family, the start of the investigation reactivated the possibility of a Romani abduction.^[10] More generally, for any parent, losing a child is the worst fear of all.^[10] And when, as in the Irish press reversal, the dialectic of the cliché and its deconstruction have shown their limits as a factor of dramatization, the defense of the threatened family unit remains a recourse, even if for the benefit of Romanis admitted on this occasion to the status of citizens and parents.^[5]

The drop in public interest, once the girl's Romani parents have been identified, marks the exhaustion of these resources.^[36] The conclusion of the Moustique article puts it this way: "Since it became known that this was a very poor child entrusted to the care of people who were a little less poor, Maria has disappeared from the headlines.^[10]

Greek media coverage

On the website of the European participative magazine Cafébabel, Giannis Mavris assessed the coverage of the case by the Greek media, which he pointed out were particularly distrusted in this country, not least for having played no warning role before the economic crisis. After the discovery of the little girl and the DNA tests proving that she was not the biological child of the couple raising her, most newspapers did not hesitate to launch the hypothesis of an abduction, with only a few warning against hasty conclusions. What's more, media bias and the exaltation of prejudices to the effect that Romani "are not civilized people" did not spare some of the most reputable press outlets, albeit in barely attenuated form.^[43]

On the website of the Institute of Race Relations, Ryan Erfani-Ghettani reminisced about how the Greek television stations (Alpha and Skai) in Farsala exploited family videos and expressions of affection from the neighborhood: to show that the little girl was raised by the whole community with the aim of making money, first through begging, then through the sex trade. Subsequently, due to a reaction of defiance from the camp's inhabitants, the BBC cameras were turned away, leaving the impression that the camp was trying to protect a secret parallel life.^[44]

For Giannis Mavris, the outcome of the case – the absence of proven criminal activity and little Maria's Romani ancestry – revealed the power of xenophobic stereotypes. However, the press did not look back. Most newspapers opted for silence, and the outcome of the affair was treated with great sobriety. This lack of self-criticism leaves the observer pessimistic about the possibility of restoring confidence in the media in Greece.^[43]

Quality of international news coverage

As for the international media, according to Natasha Dukach's analysis on the Fair Observer website, they did not sufficiently verify the information produced by the Greek press and repeated a biased presentation of the case, contributing to the promotion of stereotypes. These included their silence on the fact that little Maria's ethnic origin had been stated from the outset of the investigation by the couple who raised her; or the propagation of false information, such as the assertion that the child's biological mother had taken the initiative to claim maternity, when she was only identified following a search and after DNA tests had ruled out all putative parents.^[45] Krystal Thomas, author of an academic work on the situation of the Romani in the European Union, highlighted how Maria's "mystery", by occupying the headlines, put these populations under the gaze of the rest of the international community:^[46] her instant disappearance, without any analysis of the negative stereotypes that had been disseminated, ultimately led to increased discontent.^[47]

Estrella Israël-Garzón and Ricardo Ángel Pomares-Pastor, respectively professor^[48] and researcher^[49] in communication sciences, for their part studied how the affair was covered by the television news of several European public channels (BBC, France 2, Rai 1 and La 1), from October 19 to 22, 2013. The main finding is that the presentation of the news contributed to the stigmatization of the populations involved, notably through an ethnicization of the facts contrary to the quality standards in use.^[50]

The stigmatization was evident first and foremost in the images presented. Views of the Farsala encampment reveal the group's marginality.^[51] In the photographs in which Christos Salis and Eleftheria Dimopoulou are shown with the little girl, they are shown side by side, their gazes parallel, as if they didn't know each other.^[52] The front and side portraits of both parents, obviously taken by police officers, criminalize them from the outset. The shots of the child are almost all serious and sad.^[53] Two of them, commented Isabelle Ligner on the association website Dépêches tsiganes, operate in a "before/after" mode: while the first showed her in crumpled tracksuits, her head disheveled and her face dirty, the second, where a smile appears on a clean face topped by a well-coiffed head of hair, suggested how the good treatment lavished on her by the authorities contrasted with the negligence of the Romani couple.^[3]

According to the two academics, it is the primacy given to the emotional over the informative content that leads to the emphasis on the negative, the spectacular and the uncertainty surrounding the identity of the little girl, a "blond angel" surrounded by dark-skinned suspects.^[52] The child's appearance was supposed to be enough to rule out the possibility that her parents might be Romani. As for the ethnicization resulting from the insistence on assigning people to an ethnic identity, a common and constant feature of the treatment of the case,^[52] its systematic nature contradicted the codes of journalistic deontology established by the television stations themselves.^[51] "Through the generalization," they noted, "a division is established between 'us' – the 'whites' thrown into the search for the real parents – and 'them' – the marginalized, kidnappers, child and drug traffickers -".^{[nb 1][51]}

Although mainly based on police sources, the information presented also gave the floor to representatives of the Romani community. A clear effort was made to present all versions of events, which can be seen as progress in the coverage of this type of case. The viewpoint of an NGO ("The Smile of the Child"^[54]) was presented, and reference was made to human rights groups. However, in the majority of cases, the contextual information needed for understanding was lacking. The case was presented as a global news item, according to presentation criteria that did not differ significantly between public and private media.^[51] As the days passed, attention shifted from the kidnappers to the search for the biological mother; after the identification of the latter in Bulgaria, announced on October 25, media interest, significantly reduced,^[55] shifted from the search for the authentic progenitors to the ethnic question.^[51]

Ultimately, for the two academics, the coverage of the case, which deviated from the applicable quality standards, showed how "necessary is a more rigorous and plural treatment of information, where intercultural and ethical criteria would help to overcome the barrier of excluding difference".^{[nb 2][56]}

Unity and diversity in European media

Daniel Bonvoisin's qualitative observation was similar: most European media were content with a simplistic treatment based on agency dispatches and stereotypes. In his view, their convergence around a relatively uniform theme was indicative of the generalization across the continent of the same image of the Romani, who had become a European-wide reprobate. In his view, this trend was in line with the hardening of political discourse on these minorities: a climate devoid of nuance encouraged the press to relay rumors with a single voice.^[5]

On this basis, the analyst compared the British, French and Irish press, illustrating how the use of Romani portrayals varied according to national contexts:

• in the UK, the Romani, though relatively few in number, were regularly evoked, and usually negatively: in 2013, the imminent full integration of Bulgaria and Romania into the Schengen area had already given rise to numerous alarmist, sometimes openly xenophobic articles and political speeches; a Daily Mail report had thus anticipated the move to Britain of half a Romani village on January 1, 2014. The undifferentiated treatment given to the case by the country's media, with a few exceptions and illustrated, among other things, by their descriptions of the Pharsalus camp, was in line with political rhetoric hostile to immigrants from the East; above all, it made it possible to exploit the traditional audience spring provided by cases of missing children, an important economic element in particular for the tabloids;
• in France, the Romani question was a recurring theme of public debate; the expulsions and dismantling of camps that marked the presidencies of Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande have been joined by news stories: in July 2013, Gilles Bourdouleix's statement, "Hitler may not have killed enough of them", which quickly had this centrist elected official excluded from his party; those, the same month, of right-wing deputy Christian Estrosi, making a point of "subduing" illegal Romani; the Leonarda affair, in October 2013; subsequently, in June 2014, that of the lynching of Darius, a young Romani. The case of the "Blond Angel" was part of an already polarized context, between media outlets primarily concerned with solving the "Romani problem" and others that favored an anti-racist, critical approach. This polarization was reflected in the handling of the affair, which on the one hand saw Le Figaro give the floor to a Greek elected official for comments very similar to those made by certain French mayors, and on the other anthropologists develop in Libération a "myth-buster" capable of countering stereotypes;
• in Ireland, the Romani were relatively under-represented, not only demographically, but also in the media. The media had not yet been trained in the idea of a "Romani problem". On the other hand, they were particularly sensitive to the issue of child abuse in public institutions, which had regularly been the subject of revelations since the 1990s. These circumstances may explain why, in the case of the Irish "blond angels", they have turned their attention to defending Romani families against abuse by the police and social services.^[5]

With regard to the Irish case, Ryan Erfani-Ghettani pointed out that, prior to this inflexion, the press, influenced by the Greek case, had indeed succeeded in creating a self-sustaining hysteria, with rumor-driven actions by the authorities becoming evidence of the reality of the abductions; and that Emily Logan's report had also reminded the media of their obligations, notably in terms of privacy protection (the released little girl had not been able to return to her home besieged by journalists).^[44]

Racial background of the "Blond Angel" image

For historian and political scientist Henri Deleersnijder, the case provided an example of the particularly abusive generalizations that fuel hostility towards the Romani.^[57] In Daniel Bonvoisin's view, the magnitude of the affair also provided an ideal opportunity to analyze the media discourse on these populations. He pointed out that it had its origins in a rumor which, like the one in Orléans, combined the theme of kidnapping with a racist slant: non-Romani children, as evidenced by the color of their hair and eyes, were allegedly kidnapped by Romanis, for whom this was a habitual activity. Thus, by subscribing to the police hypothesis of the kidnapping, a large part of the European press subscribed to the prejudices on which it was based, and the media hype revealed first and foremost the racial background that structures the imaginary world of the Romani.^[5] In the words of Zeljko Jovanovic, the handling of the case showed "how quickly Europe can lapse into racist hysteria".^[36]

In Libération, Patrick McGuinness highlighted the thinly veiled racism conveyed by the nickname "Blond Angel" given to the little girl, the unspoken fact being that she is surrounded by "black demons".^[40] For paleoanthropologist Silvana Condemi, writing in the same newspaper, implying that a little girl cannot belong to its population simply on the basis of her physical appearance, or then qualifying her blondness as a "defect in the genes coming from her parents", is still to maintain the idea of homogeneous, "pure", non-mixed populations settled on their soil since the dawn of time. This concept can be compared to the one used by the Nazis when, systematizing earlier censuses and supported by the pretentious scientific work of Robert Ritter and Eva Justin, they used anthropometric measurements of the skull and face to distinguish between "pure Gypsies" and "mixed Gypsies". Paradoxically, their results, which were to justify the worst persecutions, revealed a very high level of "miscegenation" among the German Gypsy population. No population can ever be free of a biological variability that is the product of its history, its movements, its relations with others and with its environment. Which means, for example, that it's perfectly possible to be Romani and blonde.^[58]

Reawakening prejudice against Romani children-stealers

The "anomaly" constituted by the girl's blond hair was, in the words of Daniel Bonvoisin, "exorcised" by another cliché, that of the child-stealing Romani.^[5] On the Atlantico website, Emanuela Ignatoiu-Sora, who worked at the University of Florence on the legal protection of the Romani, pointed out that this prejudice has long been part of European fantasies.^[59] As Isabelle Ligner has explained, it was widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was also propagated by the press in a context of repression of "nomadic" populations, considered an integral part of the "dangerous classes". "Don't dawdle in the street, or the flying camps will take you away", was still heard in the provincial France of the 1970s.^[3]

Emanuela Ignatoiu-Sora contrasted this prejudice with the one that accused Jews of killing Christian children to obtain human blood for Easter. She deplored the fact that, at a time when all Romani were increasingly criminalized, the media were fuelling this process by feeding stereotypes. Yet, she highlighted, according to the anthropologists who have studied them, for the Romani, the family is one of their cardinal values, and the child a vital element; classically, Romani parents are keen to pass on their trade to boys and to marry off girls a little earlier than the European average, although this is not true of all communities. She concludes: "All these issues of criminalization, of media-fueled stereotypes, ultimately point to the economic problems and solutions that some of the Romani resort to in order to make a living".^[59]

In The Guardian, Romani specialist Thomas Acton asserted that there are no proven cases of children being abducted by Travellers.^[10][60] Anthropologists Marc Bordigoni and Leonardo Piasere pointed out in Libération that, in this case, the practice of child abduction by the Romani, developed in literature by Cervantes with the character of La Petite Gitane, once again proves to be a legend, as it has been for the last century in all cases for which there are records. For them, entrusting one's child to others, whether relatives, allies or strangers, as Maria's biological parents did, is a constant in the history of all populations known to ethnologists, in Europe or elsewhere.^[61] According to Isabelle Ligner, in the Romani's broad conception of the family, a child can easily be entrusted informally to an uncle or "ally" of his or her biological parents, and it is common for the same couple to raise both numerous biological children and one or more children through informal adoptions.^[3] For its part, the CEDR insists on the exceptional nature of Maria's case: while it may happen that children are raised within the extended family, for example by grandparents, it is rare for them to be raised completely outside their biological family.^[8]

Targeting of Romani families and communities

For political scientist Huub van Baar, the case illustrates, along with many others, the damage that unfounded allegations can cause, especially when the police, media and politicians failed to denounce the abuse of stereotyped images, if they didn't indulge in it themselves. On the other hand, little or no attention has been paid to ethnic profiling practices and the infringements of children's rights to which they give rise. The general, tacit tolerance accorded to such behavior is, for the academic, a sign of the contemporary emergence of a "reasonable anti-gitanism".^[62]

In the eyes of Marc Bordigoni and Leonardo Piasere, the fate of the little girl, placed in an institution, as well as that of her adopted siblings, also placed, and the similar fate then envisaged for her biological siblings, all illustrated the same reality: in practice, it is the reinforced institutional control of family life, established in Europe from the 19th century onwards, that results in the removal of children from their family environment, "for their own good". The cases of the The Children of Creuse, from 1963 to 1982 in France, and the "Children of the Open Road", from 1926 to 1973 in Switzerland, provide two examples.^[61] In The New York Times, Dan Bilefsky expressed the widespread fear among the Romani scattered across Europe that their children would be taken away for no other reason than their cultural identity or skin color.^[21]

In the same vein, sociologist Ethel Brooks^[63] highlighted the irony of the situation of little Maria, taken away from her family because it was feared that she had been abducted, while the last century was marked, "from the British Isles to the Americas, from France to Spain, from Romania to Russia, from Australia to South Africa", by the forced removal of Romani children from their families. The case showed once again that Romani motherhood is never safe, always open to challenge.^[64] As with the other blonde angels, the author saw the treatment of Maria's case as an expression of a rejection of Romani motherhood that points to a wider project, "involving the criticism of Romani mothers, the dismantling of Romani family structures, the destabilization of Romani children". Forced sterilization in the Czech Republic, school segregation in Hungary, police operations – evictions, raids, dismantling – carried out in Romani neighborhoods in Greece, Germany and France have placed the Romani, their families and their communities in a situation of permanent insecurity.^[65]

Femininity, forms of motherhood and Romani mothers themselves are delegitimized, even though it is through them that children learn the language and become individuals and members of the Romani community.^[64] In the face of these threats, the author called for a Romani feminism which, unlike liberal conceptions, can only be rooted in the community's resistance.^[65]