I come from a gypsy / travelling family AMA

[TowerTumble]

I have name changed for this. I see so much misconception and ignorance around the travelling community and towards families like mine. I've started an AMA so if you have any questions to try and stop this misconception I'll answer everything I can!

No. You'd have been financially supported your entire life and had the option to do whatever you please. Work, hobbies, whatever pleases you. Would it be so bad to care for your parents? We all do that, married or not. It's a great honour.

And yet very poor levels of literacy are one of the key things Pavee Point identifies as contributing to endemic Traveller health and MH problems. One third of Travellers surveyed in a big 2010 survey of Irish travellers reported difficulties in reading, and 50% reported difficulty reading instructions for medication.

@ThejoyofNC it’s not us that is narrow minded

What do your DC do all day, when not in school? Does it differ whether they are male or female?

By not having an education (and I don’t necessarily mean a degree) how do your adult DCs get jobs if they don’t have the minimum qualifications required. Do you allow them to have Saturday jobs like many 16/17 year olds do to earn their own money.

Yes it is different for males and females.

Girls will do housework, meet with friends, go for beauty treatments. Their social calendar is extremely busy. Some will have part time jobs. A few will learn a skill or go to college.

Boys will be in work from the age of 16 if not before. They will learn a trade. They will work full time and save heavily. By the time they get married they are earning enough to support a family.

@ThejoyofNC can a girl learn a trade alongside the boys, if they are not interested in housework, beauty treatments? Can they earn enough to be the main breadwinner? Do boys learn about housework too, cooking etc?

What do boys do at 11 if they are not in school?

I simply wouldn't allow mine to go to secondary school. If they expressed a desire for GCSEs then I'd facilitate them achieving that. But again, not in a school.

I’m sorry @ThejoyofNC, you probably explained this earlier and I missed it, but why don’t you want your children going to a secondary school?
I don’t really understand. What is wrong with them in your opinion?

This is most definitely not the case for those in my town. I would say close to 100% are on benefits and wait on council housing. They get married or live as a couple from mid to late teens, the boy spends most of his time at the gym or drinking. They maybe do odd jobs with a brother or uncle who does scrap collecting or paving, but certainly not stable work that could support a family without government help. They tend to go in and out of prison a lot too so women are left raising 4+ children on their own and often at least one has a disability. Women are not allowed to go out on their own, hence they travel in groups. If a girl wants to go for a sunbed she'll go with her mum or married sister. I don't know a single girl or woman who has a job. It goes to show that things can be very different within the culture and can vary between families and place.

I’ve lived in two different places at the different ends of the country. Both with big traveller communities. One set lived in mobile homes and the other arrived every summer to absolutely wreck the local park. They drove cars around until the grass was dead, heaped litter everywhere, lots of antisocial behaviour. Cost the council a fortune to clean up and get them to move on. Last year it cost the council over 40 grand to clean up the site and pour lime on their toilet sites. The kids rode quad bikes up and down the walkway terrorising people. Driving the mopeds at people, screaming abuse. I have also worked with the children in a school. They hardly ever attended . There was an educational programme for them specifically with outreach workers coming in. I spoke to the outreach worker many times, who expressed her despair at the fact that the girls were mostly pregnant at 16 and had no interest in education. Levels of DV were also very high.

The men turn up at the door during the summer trying to get casual work paving or ‘gardening’. The debris then gets dumped on public land. They usually leave a trail of unhappy people who are dissatisfied with the quality of the work, or the work is paid for and never completed.

Oh and the local supermarkets have to employ security staff and lock up alcohol when they arrive.

i totally can understand this because in my early adult years, I led a very happy life that differed markedly from my siblings and was markedly different from what my parents thought (NOT expected) it was even markedly different from what I thought it would be. If its narrow to believe that actions of parents that takes away choices for their children, provided that those choices are not illegal or cruel, then I will take being called narrow minded.

I mentioned the situation of one of my former pupils upthread.

She and her cousins attended school for a while - the girls at least were there long enough to be able to earn some qualifications. As I said, the women in the Traveller community stayed in council accommodation with the children, but hit the road with their husbands at other times of the year. (Officially, they were 'separated'. The children were required by their parents to keep up the pretence in front of their teachers. According to the liaison officer the school worked with, this is not uncommon - it means that the mother and children are entitled to benefits including paid for accommodation.)

By all accounts, the girl had a lovely wedding to a Traveller boy from down south - her wedding photograph was in the local paper and she was stunningly beautiful in it.

Next thing we knew, she had left him. She came back to the area and divorced him for DV and was shunned by her family thereafter for 'shaming' her family by refusing to stay with a violent young man.

I cannot get my head round a family that would rather have their daughter endure violence than leave her husband. If I understand correctly, their reasoning was that Traveller women simply don't leave their husbands on a permanent basis.

@sittingonabeach Why are you so heavily invested in this thread and constantly coming back with judgy questions and banging on about education?
Education is not the be all and end all. We don’t need it and live financially better lives than those that have been brought up to believe education is everything. Everything yous buy is either with credit or a loan, nothing yous have is your own until yous are middle aged. Even basic things like a holiday or food shopping is slapped on a credit card, yous go through life just borrowing and borrowing and are 2 missed payments from living on the street. Waiting for parents to die so yous can get an inheritance and finally own your home all the while putting your parents in care to end their days. That is not desirable to us. We buy outright everything we own whether that’s cars, holidays, homes. We live within our means and have no debt and aren’t waiting on parents to die to grab their fortune.
I don’t know why you people think we live such crap lives and the women are chained to their homes to clean and cook all day and have no choices. Many women and girls have their own businesses, I myself a married mother of 5 and a grandmother own my own bussiness, my sister has a young children and has her own bussiness, my mother works in a school, my two eldest daughters both work full time one of which is a mother herself and married. You do not need an education to be successful and earn money.

That’s fine, but then don’t claim benefits or cost the council a fortune in clean ups.

interesting analogy. By and large, queens live in gilded cages. Yes they may be wealthy but their choice is limited by what society expects of them. If they marry into royalty as adults, at least they have the opportunity to understand the choice, but girls who are born into it have their choices severely limited.

@babylamb4
"Everything yous buy is either with credit or a loan, nothing yous have is your own until yous are middle aged. Even basic things like a holiday or food shopping is slapped on a credit card, yous go through life just borrowing and borrowing and are 2 missed payments from living on the street. Waiting for parents to die so yous can get an inheritance and finally own your home all the while putting your parents in care to end their days. "
Golly generalisation much?

Pot kettle black.

i don’t do either of those things. But carry on

If you have a house do you not have a mortgage?

@babylamb4 what sort of business do women usually do?

Right through this thread, I have made clear that I have known Gypsies in the area where I live and in my (limited) experience their lives are markedly different from what is described on here. My comments have been specifically about statements that have been made on here by individuals. Nowhere have I said "oh you all do this/you all do that" How is that generalisation?

Of course, you have nothing to say so you revert back to good old stereotyping. Even after all that valuable education you can't come up with something more insightful.

No we don’t believe in borrowing and debt, everything is paid outright.

A lot have their own boutiques in women’s or children’s wear.
A lot work in the beauty industry and own their own salons ie nail techs, hairdressing, mua, sunbed salons. My niece does mobile hair ups for weddings and events and travels all over the country to do this.

Event organisers for weddings and parties.

Alot work in catering and cake making.

Dress making. Most travellers have their clothes custom made for events and their are traveller/gypsy woman who have their own dress making businesses

that’s all I can think off of the top of my head, but yeah there’s a lot of women and girls that work for themselves and do very well

plumbers? electricians?, lawyers?, Financial advisors?

Yes there are Romany lawyers. A quick Google search will show that.

did their families take them out of secondary school and are they women?

Sorry what? How would I know from a Google search? Some are women yes and others are men

I know twin brothers one is a plumber and the others an electrician. Some do those kind of jobs but it’s very rare