While for centuries, racist folktales warned children not to wander into the woods lest they get ‘snatched by Gypsies’, the historical reality is quite the reverse.  It is Romani children who have been kidnapped by the authorities and separated from their parents; kidnapped and placed in orphanages by authorities bent on forced assimilation, or in the case of the Nazis and their allies, gruesome experimentation and annihilation.  In the democratic 21st Century, disproportionate numbers of Romani children are removed from their biological families and placed in institutional state care.   

The ERRC new report Blighted Lives, which builds on a decade of fact-finding and legal challenges to such discriminatory practices across a dozen countries, found that very many at-risk Romani families do not have access to social supports, and preventative measures remain scarce, often non-existent in deprived regions where the need is greatest.

Despite the declared lack of ethnically disaggregated data, the research shows that for example in Slovakia, where Roma account for 6-8% of the total population, an estimated 63% of children in state care were of Romani origin. Roma in Romania make up 8.32% of the total population, but the overrepresentation of Romani kids in care ranged from 35% to 75% according to the region.

Link: https://www.travellerstimes.org.uk/features/europes-silent-scandal-romani-children-state-care-institutions?fbclid=IwAR3YiEmzpwXoGCHvWjQ1e6Y0io7xporK1U2KuXu62our2Ketus4bTg_jB5w

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