Open Season on Roma

The Roma have always had a difficult time of it. They have been described in 19th-Century novels as mysterious, brooding, skulking, dangerous, romantic, criminal, musical, artistic, clans inhabiting the backwoods and byways of Europe for centuries. Never trusted, always maligned and painted as outsiders within any civilized society.

Which, apart from the hostility and discrimination they faced perennially, likely suited them just fine, since they preferred to be left to their own devices.

Sometimes such devices did include petty criminal acts, swindling, taking possession of items that were not legally theirs. As outliers they likely felt entitled to express their resentment over the way in which they were treated. Particularly from those who had the power and the wealth and the means to make their lives miserable by violently taking steps to have their caravans removed from their extensive properties.

In latter-day Europe, the Roma remain persecuted. Their children are as miserably treated at the schools they are permitted to attend, as the adults are in the workplace where they are seldom permitted to earn a living. Their endemic poverty, the squalor in which they live, and the manner in which society views them, with contempt and foreboding at their presence, certainly doesn't further human understanding and acceptance on either side.

And now that a little blue-eyed blond child has been 'discovered' by social workers, living with a Roma family in France with whom the child appears to have no familial resemblance, Europe has become a free-for-all to track down those Roma now under suspicion largely unwarranted, for having abducted children not their own for nefarious purposes.

Claims: The couple with Maria, pictured in a police photo taken last Thursday at the time of their arrest. Officers grew suspicious about Maria because she bore no resemblance to the couple claiming to be her parents

Quite aside from the fact that the children are loved, have been seen to be well treated and nourished and cared for in a normal family setting, albeit an impoverished one. Children have been taken by 'well-meaning' child-welfare authorities from their family setting and from the Roma community in which they have lived all their lives, leaving them confused and tearful.

In some instances DNA tests have confirmed, as in Ireland, that the children are indeed related to those who claim to be their parents and who in any case, provided the requisite documentation as proof. In other instances, explanations that the children were handed over for care by their natural parents who were unable to care for them as a result of poverty and too many already in their brood, are being investigated.

In France, Greece, Ireland and Romania, perhaps it's time to just take a breath, and make a stop to the sensational claims and official abductions of children from their loving Roma homes.