![]() “I felt very ashamed about it,” she said.Īccording to the ERRC’s report, Romani orphans are at the greatest risk for trafficking for sexual exploitation between the ages of six and 15. I felt so bad, I cried a lot and started to miss school because I felt that everybody could see what had happened to me. Lacking any social support system, and with little knowledge as to how to live on their own, they’re frequently targeted by adults and forced into prostitution.Īs one young Romani woman who was abducted and later forced into sex work at age 16 explained to ERRC researchers, “I didn’t tell anyone. Research has shown that Romani children are also overrepresented in state care institutions, which increases their vulnerability to trafficking. This means Western clients have increased demand for trafficked children and youth from the Roma community. In addition, the ERRC’s research revealed that 70 percent of all individuals trafficked for sexual exploitation and forced to work along the Czech-German border are Roma. However, these same reports rarely mention that trafficking of non-Romani peoples frequently involves friends or family members. ![]() Much of the reporting on the subject has focused on “Roma organized crime groups” or the alleged complicity of adult members of the Roma community in trafficking or abducting children. In fact, just a week before Greek police found Maria, the European Commission together with a number of partner organizations launched a 24-month project entitled “ Countering new forms of Roma children trafficking” to address the high number of Roma children who’ve been abducted across Europe. Much of the discussion has focused on Roma as perpetrators while the experience of Roma as victims has been mostly ignored,” she said. “For many years, information has circulated linking trafficking in human beings and Roma, but it doesn’t give the complete picture. Ostalinda Maya of the ERRC explained the rationale for such research, which looked at trafficking of Roma in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. ![]() Our goal is for all of Bulgaria’s orphanages to close their doors. Additionally, AGCI’s inter-country adoption work helped make it possible in 2016 for 493 children in Bulgaria to unite with their forever families, compared to just 95 kids in 2007. These are staggering numbers, considering Roma constitute just 4.9 percent of Bulgaria’s total population. In 2007, 8,019 children were struggling in Bulgaria’s orphanages and today, 1,300 remain. In Bulgaria, police estimate that 70 percent of all illegal adoptions are of Roma children, and more than 80 percent of all children and young adults trafficked for sexual exploitation are Roma. The Roma community is “disproportionately affected by trafficking”, according to a study conducted by the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) and People in Need (PiN) in 2011. They’ve since been arrested and charged with child abduction.Īs investigators search for Maria’s biological parents (her Roma caretakers claim they adopted her from a Bulgarian mother) and a full-scale moral panic about “gypsy kidnappers” erupts across Europe, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of children living in European cities who’ve been abducted or trafficked but will never make international headlines because they themselves are Roma. Authorities found the girl to be suspiciously fair-skinned, and subjected her to a DNA test which revealed that the couple who’d been caring for her were not her biological parents. Earlier this month, the blue-eyed five- or six-year-old girl now known to the world as “Maria” was discovered living in the Farsala Roma community in the Larissa region of central Greece. I guess I wonder, as Christians, which do we embody.She’s been called “the blond angel without an identity”. ![]() It was God in Christ, reconciling and restoring the world to favor with Himself, not counting up and holding against their trespasses, and committing to us the message of reconciliation (of the restoration to favor). It seems we as individuals and a community have the ability to affect who and how people grow up to be. They slip back to addiction because their environment and relationships have not been rehabilitated along with them–they are still treated as alcoholics. It is said of alcoholics that many slip back from recovery because when they return from recovery programs, families and friends often treat them as they knew them before recovery. They’re treated this way, and so grow up to be so. It is believed that they are biologically different–believed to be genetically prone to be crooks, deceivers, thieves, prostitutes. We learned that in Bulgaria the Roma are the lowest of the low. The children there were Roma (Gypsy) children. My wife and I recently visited an orphanage in Bulgaria.
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