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Drawing of a Dutch Romani Woman with Children - Mid-Fifteenth Century

Romani children are the offspring of the Romani people who inhabit numerous nations across the world.

The traditional nomadic lifestyle of Romani families has historically played a key role in shaping the experience of Romani children.

Centuries of persecution in Europe, Asia, the America's and beyond has created strains of conservatism and insularity in traditional Romani culture. This has led to a highly unique set of circumstances for Romani children who, as a result, often struggle to adapt to non-Romani societies and institutions despite demonstrating a high degree of resilience in their efforts to survive.

With their families and in formal educational settings, Romani children are known for exhibiting behavior that most other cultures tend to associate with adulthood. This is of particular consequence when it comes to the play of Romani children as well as the comparably young age in which they partake in both work and marriage.

Despite centuries of efforts by outsiders to assimilate Romani children, they have tended to struggle in formal educational settings and the traditional socio-economic structure of Romani families has meant that most have left school early and historically remained illiterate.

Twenty-first Century Issues

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Ukrainian Romani Children - 2007

“The gypsy child stands at a crossroads of tradition and renewal, of assimilation and disappearance.”[1] - Jean-Charles Berthier, 1979

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Romani make up the largest minority group in Europe.[2] The traditional culture of Romani children has been increasingly intruded upon by non-Romani cultural forms including television, music, movies and formal education.[3] As Romani nomadism continues to vanish so to do many other aspects of traditional Romani life. Many modern Romani boys in Russia, for example, have discussed their dream of owning a home and a car.[4]

Contemporary sedentary Romani who often rely more on the state benefits of their host nations than the declining income that may be gained from traditional Romani occupations have exhibited greater inter-generational conflict and higher rates of drug and alcohol use for teenagers.[5] A 1973 report stated of the Romani in Europe, "Since (World War II), a generation has been growing up illiterate and unprepared to compete in modern society.”[6] In countries like Hungary, however, new efforts to provide modernized schools for Romani children have led to greater Romani assimilation (despite outside racial and cultural prejudices) and higher employment expectations for Romani youth.[7]

In the twenty first century, research in severely economically deprived Romani villages like the post-communist Slovakian town of Svinia has uncovered a breakdown in many facets of traditional Romani culture that have affected the lives of children. As one author has stated of Svinia, the Romani "have ceased being traditional without ever becoming modern."[8] The author blames the prior socialist policies of the region's Soviet authorities that severed Romani ties with their traditional occupations, behaviors and culture.[9] Also broken were the previous business relationships with the non-Romani community and this, coupled with a return to pre-communist racist prejudices, have led to increased poverty.[10]

A few months after Romania (home to the worlds largest Romani population) joined the European Union in 2007, Italian police cited a significant upsurge in petty thefts by children with most being identified as working on behalf of adult-controlled Romani crime rings.[11] Several of the adults involved were later charged and sentenced in Italy for crimes of child exploitation.[12]

Police in Madrid, Spain in 2009 (which featured as many as fifty highly impoverished Romani encampments on the outskirts of the city) claimed that a third of all crime suspects under the age of seventeen were Romani; usually related to theft.[13] The Madrid police also reported that 95% of all children under the age of fourteen arrested for theft are Romanian-born Romani.[14] Many Romani from other parts of Europe had migrated to the now demolished encampments in order to earn money through petty thefts and send it back to their families as Spanish legal codes offered little punishment for the crimes of minors.[15]

Birth

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In traditional Romani culture, the birth of a child is considered a sign of good luck, or God's blessing, for the parents; especially if the child is a boy.[1][3] Boys are prized for their ability to bring dowries into the family through arranged marriage as well as work in the family's businesses (girls are expected to aid their mother-in-laws in domestic duties and practice commercial fortune telling).[16]

Hungarian Romani Mother and Child - 1917

Children are desired as political assets that may help form inter-familial alliances through arranged marriages and sons and grandsons in particular can increase the political influence of tribal elders.[17] As a result, traditional Romani culture encourages a high birthrate and childless couples often seek to adopt.[17] Romani birthrates tend to drop where families have had greater assimilation into non-Romani communities.[1]

The birth of a child is celebrated as an opportunity to ensure the survival of a family's culture and traditions. [1] However, traditional Romani spirituality links childbirth to the supernatural and pregnant women practice isolation and several purification rights in order to avoid taboos and ensure the spiritual and physical health of the child.[18] This is particularly true during the first six weeks of a baby's life where in some Romani cultures babies are associated with impurity and vulnerability to illness, requiring men to be kept away until it is baptized.[3] Over time, Romani baptisms have shifted away from the Catholic Church and towards the Eastern Orthodox Church who are considered more flexible in their practices and less demanding of regular church participation.[19] Christian priests tend to be looked upon by the Romani as necessities who hold some supernatural influence yet garner little respect within the Romani culture itself.[20]

Godfathers and godmothers from extended family are chosen in accordance with the sex of the child.[18] They play a role in the child's baptism and are expected to provide gifts and support over the child's lifetime. [18]

During the centuries of Asian and European nomadism, infanticide through strangulation was occasionally practiced by some Romani parents who determined that their child exhibited birth defects.[16] Otherwise, children determined to be disabled were abandoned, left to fend for themselves or given up for adoption (or placed into institutions in modern developed countries).[21]

Infant mortality remains high in many Romani cultures. For example, Serbian Romani were cited in a 2011 study that placed their infant mortality rate at 10-20%.[2] This was mostly attributed to the young age of the mothers as well as improper care, improper feeding and a lack of parental response to childhood illnesses.[2]

Traditional Romani culture often identifies the role of local witches for instances of child mortality.[22]

Spanish Romani in the 1970s were known to lay their young babies on a table, move their arms up and down and manipulate snapping motions with the babies' fingers in order to emulate the traditional Romani dances they would be expected to learn at a later age.[23] This process was repeated by Spanish Romani when children first learn to walk by having parents move the child's feet back and forth to the beat of a drum.[24]

Bulgarian Romani Children - 2011

Infancy

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Language and Cognitive Development
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Romani tend to learn verbal and non-verbal cues from adults at an earlier age than infants of other cultures as they discover their surroundings almost entirely from watching, listening and experimenting rather than instruction.[3]

The traditional Romani language (and its now regional variants influenced by non-Romani languages) is transmitted to children through direct contact rather than instruction.[3] Infants are exposed to highly interactive oral storytelling and narrative-based songs at a very young age.[25] Exaggerated speech and other techniques are often used during story telling in order to increase their appeal to children.[3] By the 1970s, virtually all Romani children in North America still remained fluent in their traditional Romani language.[26]

Test questions used by parents (Where did the boy go? What did the rabbit say? When will the food be ready? etc.) are an oft-used technique of Romani child-directed speech in storytelling, song and everyday dialogue.[27] In Hungary in the 1990s, test questions accounted for nearly half of all Romani adult child-directed speech towards children.[27] Test questions are used by Romani parents to tease, entertain and educate children in a form that better fixes events and traditions in their collective memory (important for a mostly oral culture) as well as prepare them to become future storytellers themselves.[28][3] Paired storytelling (two or more children telling a story at once) and group role play drama are important aspects of traditional Romani childhood play activities.[29] As a result, by the ages of ten to twelve years old, Romani children in traditional cultures often become skilled at the telling of stories, jokes and anecdotes with evidence of the use of formulas and surprise endings.[30][3]

Conformity to the community is achieved verbally to a greater extent through joking, mocking and embarrassment rather than physical discipline.[3] This kind of teasing plays an important role in the Romani linguistic socialization process and the specific content of the mocking often metaphorical in nature and centered around the child's future behaviors and occupations.[31]

As Russian Kalderash Romani mother explained in 2012, "Russians always read bedtime stories to put their children to sleep. I simply rock my baby, sing a lullaby to him and that's it. I never read to him. I don't need books because I can't read."[4]

Child Care
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Australian Romani Woman and Two Young Children - 1907

In the United States, traditional Romani childcare often includes children below the age of two being looked after during the day by grandparents, great-grandparents and older siblings in order for the parents to work.[32] From the ages of five to twelve, Romani children are regarded as free from physical or spiritual impurity or defilement and are not subject to any Romani hygiene laws.[3]

Most Romani children display several forms of independence from an early age while physical punishment from parents is considered rare.[33] This independence is further fostered by Romani children being expected to prepare their own food, go to sleep without supervision and care for children younger than themselves.[3] Outside of these tasks, however, Romani children are considered to have very few responsibilities[3] and are often free to do as they please.[34]

In the United States, non-nomadic Romani over the age of two traditionally roam freely around the home or in the backrooms of their parents businesses (often fortune telling shops) or in pairs or groups around the neighborhood in close proximity to the home or business.[32] A 1980s study uncovered how these children often complained of having "no one to play with" other than siblings or first cousins and were discouraged by their parents from forming bonds with non-Romani children.[35]

The lack of organized childhood activities allows Romani children to learn how to fend for themselves while paradoxically drawing them into closer reliance on their families of which all adult decisions are made.[36] The concept of spending time completely on their own is discouraged in traditional Romani culture and those who attempt it become a source of distrust.[37]

Young Romani children are expected to eat the same foods as adults and often sleep in the same bedroom[38] with older children sleeping wherever they desire.[39]

Incidents of child abuse (that may or may not be acknowledged by state authorities) are handled internally amongst the Romani through their private family courts or kris.[35]

In the twenty first century, researchers in the extremely impoverished post-communist Romani town of Svinia in Slovakia have observed children urinating and defecating anywhere they choose[40] while regularly playing outside naked or semi-naked.[41] Injuries due to a lack of parental supervision were observed as frequent[42] and violence by parents towards older children commonly replaces the affection shown young infants.[43] Most Romani families in Svinia subsist on government social assistance which increases based on the number of children so the community's birthrate remains high.[44]

Ukrainian Romani Children - 2008
Play
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"Gypsy children don't play games; they reenact life." - British primary school teacher, 2005[45]

The preceding quote from a British primary school teacher echoes an earlier 1990s study that suggested traditional western concepts of children's play appear to lack purpose or value to Romani children.[3]

Traditionally, most of the play of Romani children has mimicked their parents behaviors, tasks and occupations.[46] Romani as young as four years old have been observed dismantling items for scrap metal in emulation of the adults in their family.[3] Evidence suggests that some Romani as young as five or six years old are able to differentiate between high and low quality metals for sale as scrap and have the ability to identify and clean spare mechanical parts.[3]

When confronted by children from other cultures, a 2005 study saw European Romani children describe their own style of play as superior due to it being more "adult" in nature.[47] For these Romani children, play often merges with work as they are afforded actual responsibility for tasks that contribute to the family income with few books or toys on hand (appliances, work tools, televisions and videos are more common instead).[48]

The learning of Romani dances and various musical instruments has played a major role in the traditional culture of Romani children.[49] In many Romani cultures, children "learn to internalize the gender-specific division of labour that holds that vocal music is a predominantly female prerogative, while instrumental music is almost exclusively reserved for men."[50] Researches in the Slovakian town of Svinia have regularly observed young girls spontaneously bursting into songs, either conversational lyrics based on immediate observations or occasionally non-Romani pop songs.[51]

Watching television has assumed an increasingly larger role in the lives of many Romani children but the Kaldarash Romani of Eastern Canada in the 1970s reported their children playing house, card games, drawing pictures and throwing sharpened sticks in javelin-type contests.[52]

Violent play amongst boys and girls is often encouraged by adults as a means of toughening the children up physically and better preparing them for adulthood.[53]

The Russian Kalderash Romani in twenty-first century Russia list children playing on roads as the most dangerous threat to their well being.[4]

Non-Romani celebrations for achievements like walking, starting school, graduating or turning twenty-one are not part of traditional Romani culture but are met none-the-less with interest and joy by parents and families.[3] In Canada, Romani birthday parties traditionally featured a family meal with cake and cash gifts for the child.[54]

While there have yet to be any authenticated cases of the Romani abducting children, there are some recorded cases of children running away from their homes to join the Romani. [55]

Primary Education

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“The Romani people have been normads for two thousand years.  In 1952 the Government decided to end the travelling life.  To-day Rom have regular jobs but they think of the life they led in the forests.  They live in new houses, their children go to school – but the woods are there in their memory.”  - 1952 Letter to a Polish newspaper by a young Romani

Traditional Views

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Traditional Romani views on formal education focused on the acquisition of reading and writing in local non-Romani languages and the valued social interactions with non-Romani children in order to foster future business relationships.[46] Nevertheless, near the end of the twentieth century, approximately 80% of the world's Romani population was considered illiterate.[3] A 2002 survey of Slovakian Romani revealed that most parents only value reading and writing as skills and placed little value in their ability educate or introduce new concepts to the Romani culture.[56] Formal education is often seen by the Romani as subverting family values and creating a lack of respect for elders.[57] Kalderash Romani in Eastern Canada in the 1970s associated formal education with sexual immorality and the breaking of taboos like public declarations of urination (when a student must ask a teacher if they may use the washroom).[58]

As government welfare benefits for families became linked to children's attendance in schools in many nations towards the end of the twentieth century, many Romani families looked upon school attendance as a new opportunity for children to generate income for the family.[35]

Post-World War II attempts to incorporate Romani children into non-Romani classrooms have often been wrought with a lack of differentiation by teachers between the tenets of oral and written cultures as well as an inability to engage Romani students or develop an understanding of their home life.[3] A twenty-first century study found that Romani children with the most amount of absences actually had the least amount of conflict with curriculum, teachers or other students and this may serve as a basis for future Romani education policy.[59]

Classroom Behavior

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In classroom settings, Romani children prefer toys that relate to their own backgrounds while often dismantling toys of all kinds in replication of the adults of their home-life who, in Europe, have come to rely on the sale of scrap metal as a primary source of income.[60] Romani students tend to lose interest in games that have many rules or require long periods of concentration like chess or Scrabble. [61] As per traditional Romani culture, most students prefer to play in groups with the solitary activity of reading being a source of disinterest (although Romani children often respond more positively to picture books as well as being read to).[62]

Romani boys in particular tend to react badly to losing and have trouble sharing or waiting their turn.[61] Romani boys tend to use violence to intimidate others in another form of play imitating their observations of adults, in this case displays of masculinity.[63] Romani children tend to see non-Romani children as deficient due to their lack of a propensity towards physical violence and their inability support each other in violent group situations.[64]

Romani girls often look down upon non-Romani school children whose play they consider childish and more fantasy based (for example, pretending to be princesses or pop stars) while their own play tends to emulate more adult activities like relationships, kissing and even some sexual activities.[65]

A 2005 study found that many Romani children found the classrooms of European formal educational institutions to be restrictive, claustrophobic and boring.[66] This echoes a previous study from the 1990s in which Romani students felt burdened by misunderstandings, discipline, routine, quiet and the requirements that they learn abstract facts.[3] Many throughout Europe described their school experience as strange and prison-like in comparison to their home life.[66] Older students also described the difficulties inherent in regularly leaving school in order to accompany their family on business travels which often resulted in having to repeat curriculum which left them embarrassed at having fallen behind the other students.[66] Twenty-first century Romani students have reported lamenting having to be in a classroom when the seasons turn warmer and they long to begin traveling with their families.[67]

History

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In sixteenth century Hungary, Germany, Spain and England, Roma as young as two years old were at times forcibly removed from their homes by authorities and Roma parents' efforts to retrieve their children may have been responsible for the Romani's later reputation as child thieves.[68]

A resolution adopted by the World Romani Congress in the early 1970s stated, "Where attendance at existing schools is not possible, to encourage the provision of special classes near caravan sites or other places where groups gather regularly to facilitate the integration of Romani children into normal schools and to ensure that the education programs for Romani children link up satisfactorily with those of secondary school or other forms of continued education.”[69]

Eastern Europe
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Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780) issued a decree in 1773 that ordered all Romani's who were married and had children over the age of five must surrender them to the state for formal education.[70] The decree also targeted the behavioral habits of Romani children by commanding, amongst other things, that they be clothed at all times and separated by gender when sleeping.[71] Despite two night raids into Romani camps by Habsburg officials that resulted in the acquisition of several children, the decree was difficult to enforce and was soon abandoned before being briefly reinstated by Joseph II (1741-1790).[72]

Romanian Romani Girls - 1869

Official Soviet application of Marxist-Leninist theory in Eastern Europe categorized the Romani as "victims of capitalism" for whom it was the duty of the state to support and correct the historical injustices perpetrated against them.[73] Efforts were made to assimilate the Romani by giving the adults jobs in farms, mines, construction sites and factories, outlawing nomadism and instituting a law which stated that no community could have a Romani population over 5%.[74]

Despite the new social mobility and economic opportunities granted to Romani adults, these laws split up many of the extended family units considered vital to traditional Romani culture.[73] Many of the children of Romani families affected by these changes were determined to be "disabled" and "socially handicapped" by Soviet authorities and placed into state-run care institutions along with the children of Romani parents who were labeled "work shy." [73] Many of the children who were instituted into the dense bureaucratic network of Soviet care facilities were Romani and many later turned to crime having lost their material and spiritual connections to their culture and families.[73]

Soviet Romania's ban on abortion saw an increase of Romani children being placed into state care, reportedly based on Romani parents' views that their unwanted children would receive greater opportunities for the future by being in these facilities.[75] For those who are admitted, very little education was reportedly gained through the state ordered compulsory attendance and many Romani turn to crime and prostitution upon departure.[75]

The school master in a village in Soviet Hungary in 1969 refused to admit Romani students feeling they were unclean and could contribute to the spread of disease.[76]

In the post-communist Eastern Europe of the 1990s, few Romani children were being admitted into state-care institutions due to the operating costs of modern facilities, despite often dire circumstances.[75] Eastern European Romani families faced severe unemployment after the fall of communism due to the absence of government works projects and a reduction in welfare benefits.[75] Having lost connections to their traditional occupations and economic relationships to non-Romani communities and facing returning racial and social prejudices that had been supressed under communism, Romani in Eastern Europe have faced dire socio-economic circumstances.[75] However, the Czech Republic's efforts to restrict Romani nomadism led to 80% school attendance and 75% adult employment in the early 1990s.[77] Both the Czech Republic and Hungary saw greater success with the non-Romani adoption of Romani children in this period.[77]

In 1991, the heavily Romani-inhabited town of Svinia in Slovenia closed its community operated daycare to Romani children and bared them from the public school cafeteria and all after school clubs[78] due to concerns over a variety of socially unacceptable behaviors.[79] Authorities explain the exclusion from school activities and the day care ban by highlighting the non-payment of fees by Romani parents but both the school principle and Svinia's daycare director stated that if a Romani students were integrated into these programs than the non-Romani parents would withdraw their children.[80] Prior to World War II, it was not uncommon for non-Romani adults in Svinia to become godparents to Romani children while maintaining a working relationship between the two communities.[81] Romani students in Svinia also had positive relationships with non-Romani students in the post-World War II era through to the fall of communism in the region.[82] In the twenty first century, however, non-Romani Svinian students are provided newer and better schools and facilities than Romani students.[83] Most Romani adolescents in Svinia later attend trades-based vocational schools but still struggled to find employment.[84]

In Romania in the 1990s, most Romani left school after the fourth grade and only 10% finished high school.[85] Many students reported facing prejudice from other students as well as teachers.[85]

In Serbia, only 8% or Romani children are reported to have finished elementary school in 2010.[86]

A Russian Kalderash mother explained in 2012, "What have they been teaching my child for fives years? He is in fifth grade now but he doesn't know anything. He cannot read at all and he can only do just little (sic) bit of math. I don't know what they have been teaching him."[4]

Western Europe
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The British Education Act of 1944 determined that Romani children fell under the same school exemption laws as non-Romani rural children whose labour was often required on their family's farm.[87] Many British Romani also provided farm labour in the period and their children were exempted from school during the spring and summer in order to follow their parents to work sites.[87] Seen as "innocent" and "wild" by 1950s British governments, the Romani were labeled a "delinquent subculture" and as a result many children were taken into state custody to be raised and educated.[87] British attitudes changed somewhat in the 1960s as authorities began to acknowledge Romani children's expertise in horses, clothes-peg making, agricultural work, metals, textiles, money counting and card games.[88] However, most considered the Romani's interest in formal education and an effort to acquire greater literacy simply a means of maintaining their traditional way of life amidst new business requirements of documentation and form filing.[88] In Great Britain in the 1980s, nearly 50% of Romani students had been placed in special schools for the handicapped and the number reached approximately 80% in France.[3] In post-World War II France, schools were required to register all Romani children in their district which enabled authorities to claim that French Romani were receiving a formal education but further investigation revealed that approximately 90% of Romani children were illiterate and little other progress towards education had been made.[89]

A study of the Romani in Scotland in the 1990s revealed that most Romani parents considered formal education for their children beyond reading and writing to be irrelevant to the lifestyle (a common complaint of Romani internationally[3]) of their family while their opposition to it worked to reaffirm their Romani identity.[90]

In Belgium, historic anti-Romani laws prevented groups from camping in one place for more than one day and one night which effectively prevented Romani children from attending formal educational institutions.[91]

From 1926 until 1973, one region in Switzerland carried out a policy of seizing Romani children from their parents and placing them into either adoption or state-run institutions. [92] In the early 1990s the Swiss government was ordered to pay financial compensation to those children who had then begun to search for their families.[93]

In Sweden in the 1970s, little to no effort was made by schools to acknowledge or account for the culture, language or values of Romani students in the classroom which led to the resentment of Swedish authorities by Romani children and parents.[94] The Swedish effort was focused around assimilation with many Swedish Romani parents abandoning nomadism and taking up traditionally non-Romani occupations like factory work and truck driving.[95] A study of Romani students under ten years old in a special Romani school in Stockholm, Sweden in the 1980s revealed that most parents did not think that exposing their children to school was a threat to their culture or way of life since the students actually retained very little of what they learned.[35]

In the 1970s, Norway went so far as to implement compulsory state education on Romani children which in some cases resulted in them being removed from their parents care and forced into boarding schools.[96]

A survey of Spanish Romani school children in the 1970s reported their hopes for the future as including an end to fighting between Romani and non-Romani peoples, further education for themselves and their people, more money and their own place to live (many of the children's families had taken up homes in naturally formed caves).[97] Most also identified singing, dancing and the bonds they shared with their families as their favourite parts of Romani culture.[98]

United States of America
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The 1980s saw a surge in Romani parents in the United States willingly sending their children to public schools as many states began to tie parents' welfare benefits to the school attendance of their children.[35] In the United States, most Romani children have traditionally been removed from school around the ages of ten to eleven years old.[35]

Adolescence

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High School

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In a 2002 study of Romani teens at a regular public high school in Slovakia (most Romani in Slovakia attend special state-run Romani schools or no school at all), the non-Romani teachers and students surveyed considered them overly aggressive and cited their regular use of foul language and physical violence towards each other.[99] Others reported what they viewed as Romani boys acting sexually aggressive towards non-Romani girls at a young age.[100] While most non-Romani's expressed a negative opinion of Romani culture and behaviors, some were sympathetic and one Romani student herself felt that the state's efforts to help the Romani would prove fruitless due to a lack of cultural understanding despite maintaining that more education was the cure for Romani social and economic plight.[101]

Work

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Early German records of the Romani in Europe detail a children's acrobatic dance troupe that performed shows in Paris in the early fifteenth century.[102] They were later recorded as performing in Meiningen for eleven days in 1435 before a local priest forced them out of the city.[102]

Spanish Romani Girls - 1917

Girls ranging from ten[32] to fourteen years old are encouraged to begin telling fortunes; as, for example, was the case with Romani in Vancouver, British Columbia in the 1970s.[103] They learn the practice primarily through the observance of their mothers and grandmothers as well as customers with presumably some instruction.[3] Romani fortune tellers in Vancouver, British Columbia in the 1970s considered the practice only as a means of extracting money from the public rather than helping people.[104] While they also thought that there was a time when Romani women actually did possess the ability to tell fortunes, they felt that the art had been lost over time and it was considered shameful for a contemporary Romani themselves to visit a fortune teller.[104]

In Spain in the 1970s, Romani girls in their early teens often began performing as dancers in traditional Romani music events.[105] These shows also featured boys as dancers and musicians.[106]

Romani boys as young as ten in the United States in in the 1980s are recorded as accompanying their fathers on business ventures as an early form of apprenticeship.[32] Seen as a nuisance around their mothers' fortune telling shops, boys often spend more time at fathers' work, which in the United States has traditionally meant auto-body repair; a leftover skill from centuries of Romani metalworking in Europe.[35]

Daily childcare arrangements are also influenced by work requirements and which parent has the more profitable business.[35] In 1980s Yugoslavia, for example, Romani pottery businesses were common and women and children engaged in the most difficult task of repeatedly stamping on the unprocessed clay with their feet in order to make it more malleable.[35] At the end of the twentieth century, Romani children were known to accompany their parents to a variety of jobs including flower selling and tarmacing in addition to scrap metal selling and fortune telling.[3]

A Kalderash Russian-Romani female teenager explained in a 2012 documentary in regards to getting married at a young age, "I wanted to become a nurse but there is no way Romani girls can do that."[4] A young Romani boy from the same village, considered a local "genius" because his family owns a computer and he has memorized the names and numbers of European football players stated of his future, "I'll be a builder when I grow up, not a football player. Romani men can't become football players. We all become builders."[4] The boys in Russia's Kalderash Romani community often accompany their fathers to their home construction sites in order to act as assistants.[4]

Because traditional Romani family culture and nomadic business practices puts children outside the categories of those in industrial wage-labour societies, some social reformers have questioned the role of Romani children as exploited slave labourers.[107]

Marriage

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At puberty, both males and females are considered to be of age for traditional Romani arranged marriage.[108] Serbian Romani in the twenty first century are reported to consider the age of fourteen to be too old for girls to marry based on the fear that they may have lost her virginity by that point which is considered a cultural sin and a disappointment to her husband's family which could result in annulment.[109]

Juvenile marriage likely originated in medieval pre-European Romani communities or earlier as a means of having females reproduce at the beginning of their reproductive capabilities in an effort to ensure greater fertility for the family and community.[110] Twenty first century researchers have also highlighted juvenile marriage's role in regulated young peoples' behavior and commitment to the Romani family and community before they have the opportunity to make other choices.[111] Researches have identified the success of this practice in ensuring a high birthrate despite it coming at the expense of female liberty and the health of their children.[112]

Most Romani children in the severely impoverished Slovakian town of Svinia are exposed to adult sexual activity at an early age through observation of their parents as well as the erotic content regularly broadcast on satellite television and most Svinian Romani children often incorporate adult sexuality into their play.[113] As a result, most females in the community are pregnant by the age of sixteen[114] and as one researcher described, "“Unable to pursue other pastimes, such as organized sports, academic studies, drama, or simply what we call ‘hobbies,’ the settlement’s teenagers develop an early interest in sexuality and the whole gamut of behaviors associated with it.”[115]

In traditional Romani cultures, families' treatment of girls changes when they reach puberty as they are no longer allowed to sleep in a bed with other children, let their hair down in front of men, take their shoes off in front of anyone or wash, hang out to dry or exchange any clothing with or in front of any children or men.[3]

Following marriage, traditional Romani women's clothing includes long skirts and head scarfs.[3] Traditionally, grooms were to present brides with enough new dresses to last her ten years, but in the twenty first century she is often simply given a quantity of uncut cloths and fabrics.[4]

Married Romani women traditionally take direction from their mother-in-laws regarding gender-prescribed tasks like cooking, cleaning and childcare[3] but acquire a larger role in the decision making process as they enter adulthood.[116] Having children early is often desired by married women as it begins a process of greater independence from their mother-in-laws.[117] Males have less domestic obligations during a marriage but also less direct influence on children as females are responsible for most of the childcare.[118]

In the twenty first century, young Romani couples brought together through arranged marriages often will not know each other very well and live with each others family's in a more sibling-like relationship until adulthood.[4] Russian Kalderash Romani marry off boys as young as ten to girls who have reached puberty.[4] Brides are selected by the boys parents and a payment is made to her parents as a kind of reverse dowry using gold coins that have been in use since the eighteenth century.[4]

A twenty first century UNICEF report condemned child marriage as a "loss of adolescence, imposed sexual relations and abrupt individual development.”[119]

European state interventions to prevent the juvenile marriages of young Romani's soon after they begin puberty has proven difficult since traditional Romani culture considers these arranged marriages to be of primary importance in its economic and societal independence and maintenance.[2]

  1. ^ a b c d Berthier, Jean-Charles, “The Socialization of the Gypsy Child,” International Social Science Journal, 31, 2 (January 1979): 377.
  2. ^ a b c d Čvorović, Jelana. “Juvenile Marriages, Child-Brides and Infant Mortality Among Serbian Gypsies,” Glasnik Etnografskog Institute, 59, 2 (2011): 27.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z Smith, Tracy, “Recognizing Difference: The Romani ‘Gypsy’ Child Socialization and Education Process,” British Journal of Sociological of Education, 18, 2 (1997): 243-256.
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