"WHITE PEOPLE IN DANGER" - a thread for every dumbass human interest story about WHITE PEOPLE WHO MIGHT BE IN DANGER

Ladies and gentlemen... the Midwest Area Heinz Colloseum presents... OVOVERSHADOWEDER!!!!

"are you ready to ROOOOOCCCK!?!?!?"

the first page of GIS for roma children shows several children with light complexions and fair hair, as you would expect for a population that has been living in slavic countries for about a thousand years

The couple in Romania say that they were asked to look after the girl by her biological mother who is Bulgarian. There doesn't seem to be any actual evidence to disprove this at the moment.

In their five hours of testimony, which was given in private but quickly leaked to the media, the couple however claimed that the child’s biological parents – who they said were Bulgarian Roma – had entrusted the child to Ms Dimopoulou’s care shortly after her birth.

Mr Sallis is reported to have said that when he had arrived home after a fortnight’s absence, his wife had already been given the infant.

As he had a criminal record, Mr Sallis was anxious not to keep her but his wife insisted, having grown fond of the little girl.

It is understood that the accused named the Bulgarian couple and requested that the authorities track a mobile phone that they claim belonged to the Bulgarian man. However, that can only be carried out with an order from a higher court.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/10/15/six-months-later-man-who-found-dzhokhar-tsarnaev-his-boat-tries-move/fMSWzruQfE2EUNYXjXKOZP/picture.html

the couple however claimed that the child’s biological parents – who they said were Bulgarian Roma – had entrusted the child to Ms Dimopoulou’s care shortly after her birth.

In any country and in any era, when life is very unstable and access to the necessities is full of uncertainty, children will get placed out with someone who offers to take care of them, usually a relative, but not always. Among the poor this has been a constant theme for as far back as anyone can see. This only seems weird to people in wealthy western countries, and only in the past half century or so.

Gardai received a tip-off from a member of the public that a six or seven year-old girl was living with a large Roma family

misread this as "living it large with a Roma family" tbh

Irish police who took a child away from a second Roma family overnight have since handed him back, it emerged on Wednesday.

The latest child was removed late on Tuesday night from a family living in Athlone, Co Westmeath, in the Irish Midlands.

DNA samples were taken from the child as well as the Roma couple who are the child's ostensible parents.

yeah this is getting very weird

in any one case im strongly for the welfare of the child being paramount to being left as is 'just in case', but when

i) this appears to be a kneejerk panic of the lowest sort

and

ii) social services in ireland have been famously lax in using these powers historically

then this is shit

yeah the greek kid is not their biological child but i suspect this kid is their actual child and the cargo cult imbeciles who think 'not looking like your parents' (and not having extensive documentation despite being itinerant people from a poor country) is sufficient justification for taking the kid into care should be fired

― Maggishos soyfriend. Wins. (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Tuesday, 22 October 2013 14:56 (2 days ago)

DNA tests have proved that a seven-year-old girl taken from a Roma family in Dublin on Monday is their daughter.

The family said they were "delighted" that their daughter had come home.

They also said they would be taking legal advice, and that serious questions have arisen over the procedures used in the case.

gardai done fucked up

come on, she was blonde

Apparently they did the same thing with a two-year-old boy, who has subsequently been returned to his parents, this week as well.

yep in the midlands

i'd imagine that there's been a spate of calls, mainly crank, after the case in greece. in an environment as officious as the irish health/justice system (especially with media/public attention thrown in) you'd log and do the basic investigation on each of those to audit level satisfaction of duty.

say, then, that out of however many cases hurriedly investigated around ?europe? in the past week, you get some certain % where there is no documentation readily available or w/e. your dilemma is to act quickly before these nasty gypsies run away again with the child or to allow for further investigation.

if your choice is the former, eesh

what's weird about this is the sense in which irish institutions seem to lag behind public opinion. i suppose that shouldn't be surprising, but who are these people making these decisions? is there just a v low turnover of staff in the gardai/health service?

makes me want to change my username.

Muddle management, mayne

in the case of the girl in dublin, i thought there was something about her birth cert which didnt match up or was faked.

Birth cert was deemed "inconclusive", whatever that means. Passport, like most children's passports at that age, had a baby photo.

Birth cert was deemed "inconclusive", whatever that means.

You couldn't tell if she was blonde and blue-eyed from it

The DExp's newest "repeating headline" is redefining all small girlchildren as a 'Maddie' (apostrophes included)

Most recent, was " 'Maddie' found in Dublin "

Will this case put a stop to this, or will there be another next week?

Watch this space...

Should try Glasgow, that's full of maddies on a Friday night

I imagine Roma with fair kids are catching all kinds of shit from "do-gooders" all over, even beyond the official meddling

also really disgusted by the tabloids using inflammatory bullshit in headlines in quotes, along the lines of "Blond Angel" "Abducted" By "Gypsies" and Another "Maria" Found In Dublin

the tabloids will do what they do but the gardai / social workers / etc in this case are the lowest grade of thick biddable little nazis and should be left to the private sector where they can find their cognitive and moral level emptying dogshit bins

This is true but the unchecked, tolerated racism at all levels of popular culture (films, TV, press, etc)when it comes to Roma ppl is a huge contributing factor to how people in those roles make the decisions that they do.

that doesn't mitigate in the slightest, that functionaries are to act impartially is especially important when hysteria threatens individual rights

perhaps unfortunate that police and to a lesser extent social workers are a self-selected group with an inclination to a particular value system

No, it doesn't mitigate it but it's too easy to point to gardai / social services culture as being the problem (not that this was what you were doing, but it is being done) without looking at the Roma's position in wider society as the last group there is no real social opprobrium associated with traducing on the reg.

they are the fucking problem cuz unlike various private entities who are exercising their democratic rights to be hysterical racists, the state has a legal duty to serve and protct them and its functionaries a contractual duty

Yeah - don't think anyone could argue with that. Journalists have responsibilities too, and it's also been horrible to see stories that read like they were written in the 1920's. Agree though that we should expect more from officialdom than the Daily Mail though.

journalists don't really have responsibilities in any binding sense tho? a few legal limits to what they can write, but contractually their only obligation is to their employer

their notional 'responsibilities' are not enforceable beyond conscience (and very extreme legal limits that they aren't exceeding here) so there is no reason to describe them as 'problems' which by definition are susceptible to being solved

Obviously in this specific case the gards were the direct problem but the racism that's so endemic it doesn't code as racism for lots of people any more is a contributing factor. They aren't simply responding unprofessionally to short-term press hysteria, they're working off generations of widely-held cultural stereotypes about Roma people. If everyone from the broadsheets to Hollywood is reinforcing, rather than challenging, those racist stereotypes nothing is likely to change.

don't really see officials being held to a higher standard by law and journalists being held to higher standard by conscience as mutually exclusive

a higher standard than both have exhibited in this case, that is

it is theoretically within our power to change/enforce the law, is the point

As a society, a fair amount of work has been done on other forms of endemic racism, though.

Guards, aiui, have no discretion if the hse ordered this

they're working off generations of widely-held cultural stereotypes despite being paid to undertake highly sensitive authority roles that require higher levels of tact and sensitivity higher than those of the average poujadist commentbox psycho

to focus forensically on their failures here isn't to neglect or abstract them from 'the wider society' but to concentrate on the only thing we can expect to control

even a liberal conception of the state allows that conditions in the wider society might be ameliorated, not by activism but by functionaries simply doing what they are contracted to and providing an example that might ever so gradually normalize private life

nakh otm here

sniffily tho you do it, and tbh the ethos amongst public sector ime is determinedly middle class, catholic, dancing at crossroads irish (insofar as it can be determined) which does tend to bring with it a certain amount of eyerolling when dealing with the difficult needy cases that one exists to deal with to begin with, there exists a clear understanding of the impartiality of the role and if anything the inherently conservative terror of overreaching that is the norm ought really have been embraced here as a good in its own right.

Dont imagine heads will roll, the arg will be that the evil of nonaction has been a stick with which the hse has been beaten with in the past and it will be argued that they were responding to a 'genuine public concern'.

Not nearly good enough, but will be good enough to dissipate the more serious repercussions i expect.

I would stress that Nakh is entirely otm and i'm not disagreeing. I just think that the broader climate of racism the authorities are working in needs to be addressed more than it currently is and that the tools that have been moderately effective in combating other forms of prejudice should be applied here as well.

xp

yeah i think drawing a contrast with the numerous cases of reluctance to remove children in situations where there's clear and compelling evidence that they're being harmed makes this whole incident look that much more outrageous

Well, historically true.

But as of the last year or two there's been a move towards early and forceful intervention (most recent case was avweek ago and went to the supreme court i think) so possibly an unfair perception but in general the public will def think that the hse doesnt intervene in enough cases id say.

Looks like they may have found the Greek kid's birth mother, a Roma woman now in Bulgaria: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/europe/article3903489.ece

xp okay that's interesting

I imagine the Blonde Angel no longer an angel, now merely blonde

Putting aside the clowns in this case for a minute, it's kind of amazing how quickly the public perception of social workers went from 'officious liberal do-gooders breaking up loving families because of political correctness' to 'slack liberal do-gooders refusing to remove children from abusive homes because of political correctness'.

Interchanging definition depending tbh

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/ombudsman-to-investigate-garda-role-in-roma-cases-1.1573660

^^ The photo in that story is especially gripping. Content: A building and a parking lot with autos parked. Caption: Tallaght Garda station where a Roma girl was taken before she was put into care after being taken from her family.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/cyprus/10412882/Ben-Needham-not-man-from-Cyprus-DNA-test-finds.html