AIBU to find it disgusting that gypsies have taken over a school playground

[Adizzylass2014]

whilst attending my best friends wedding today in a little village I was horrified to see that gypsies had taken over the school playground. There was rubbish all over the floor, children and dogs running all over the place and scantily clad women puffing away.
why a school playground, these people have no morals. The poor caretaker is going to have his work cut out for him as there was at least 15 caravans!

A friend of mine owns a sports and social club, he had a gypsy wedding party there once and they absolutely wrecked the place and then 3 caravans camped in the car park for 2 weeks leaving a disgusting amount of mess, intimidating the boys who were playing football there and starting fights with the men.
sadly because of this he refuses to allow them to hire the hall now. when all you hear is negativity about them all the time of course noone wants them to camp in their town or village. Those of you that have experienced the bad side will agree that they can be very scary, we don't want our children playing near where they are for fear of them getting hurt on discarded glass or worse. If they respected the land that they camp on and be repectful towards the locals then I'm sure they will not be vilified so much.

For anyone interested in reading a very short article about the reality of life for gypsies and travellers, then this article makes for sober and interesting reading. It touches on stats for bullying; the failure of planning applications (which makes it difficult for gypsies/travellers to settle anywhere!) and the other problems they face because discrimination against them is the last acceptable bastion of racism.

Independent Article on Anglia University's Report on Gypsies and Travellers

Problem is, there used to be proper sites all over the country for them to pitch, with facilities. Now, there are very few, and a lot of the remaining ones are private. (I used to live right next to a private one and most of the travellers were fine. And perfectly clean.) The issue is lack of facilities.

I'm not saying they are all good. Or bad. But it must be really crap being stereotyped, having no heating & needing to go abroad in winter if you want to be warm, having a culture where you don't have your toilet inside your house (because who wants to smell & clean the chemical loo all the time, let alone try to find somewhere to empty it when you're getting evicted daily), and not being able to find anywhere to live where there are toilets & showers available.

And so the lack of facilities extends to leaving your rubbish strewn about the place instead of taking it to the nearest tip? Or not buying portaloos and using them? I also having noticed them being evicted daily - not the ones round here anyway. They've been here for weeks/months, with the associated crap building up around them.

YANBU why should residents and the local council have to foot the bill and the consequences for these situations.

As soon as they arrive illegally here, my local council provides huge wheelie bins and a refuse collection service (at no cost to the travellers). They also send people to make enquiries about their general health and welfare, and their children’s education.

Yet they've mostly always left the sites strewn with rubbish and other unspeakable things.

No KateAdiesEarrings, I literally cannot name one positive traveller experience I have had. I could name a University on my doorstep that had travellers take over their sports ground...took £150K to clear up the mess and restore the site to a usable state...it's bloody disgusting! Used sanitary towels and tampons littering everywhere, dirty nappies, they even destroyed the sports ground toilets, just mindless vandalism, washing stolen from communal washing lines, caught red handed on several occasions. Woodland near my home, totally ruined 18 months ago by travellers, again used it as a toilet, a sanitary towel/tampon dump, human excrement in the children's playground, needles, shoplifting....I would happily defend the right of anybody to live the life they choose, but if they fail to respect the basic rules of human decency, in my opinion, they lose the right to be treated with any respect at all and anybody who boots a horse full on in the face when it has collapsed deserves to be obliterated. No tolerance here.

Our neighbours left rubbish strewn around, and old bits of furniture SirChenjin does that mean all English people are like that? Clue: it's a trick question No, they're not but don't let some stereotyping and prejudice get in the way of your anecdotal evidence

Here's a novel idea. Treat gypsies/travellers the way you would treat any other person. If you think they are being anti-social, complain to the LA; complain to the noise abatement officer; complain to the environmental health; complain to the police. And if, after all those complaints, nothing changes then consider that maybe, just maybe, they actually aren't breaking the law and that your intolerance of their behaviour is being exacerbated by your bigotry.

It's also worth noting that there are different groups who live in caravans in the UK. Travellers (both English/Scottish and Irish). New-age travellers. Gypsies/Roma (historically and ethnically a different group). Travelling showpeople (who provide funfairs, etc). The majority of the latter are registered as businesses; pay Council Tax; VAT, etc. And of the four groups I've listed, there is only one of them that would not have their toilet in their caravan. The others do have toilets, bathrooms, and central heating in their caravans and/or park homes. Travelling is their culture and way of life, but their homes are built to the same standard as houses including meeting all BS marks and having insulation, double glazing, etc.

I once spend a while travelling with a group of Israelis just out of the army in Thailand. They were rude, obnoxious and shit to everyone; Thai and other. I actually quite liked one of them (the least twunty) and after we got back to Bangkok, we went clubbing and I asked him why they had all behaved like such shits. His answer, "everyone hates us anyway, we might as well".

I wonder if I was a traveler, reading this thread, why on earth I would bother to clean up and act the way the settled community wanted me to when a) people think all travelers are scum and b) the expectation is so dire, racist and ingrained.

I think that if it were a tiny minority who behaved this way then anyone generalising would be (quite rightly) taken to task. The fact is that so many of us from across the country have seen the same type of mess left whenever the travellers are in town, year after year after year.

The last lot of travellers that pitched up here did so on council playing fields next to the canal. Used the goalposts to hang their washing from.
When they left the canal towpath was white with toilet paper, it looked as if it had snowed, and the accompanying human waste was eye watering.
When they were evicted there were gas canisters floating in the canal, and the rubbish everywhere was unbelievable.

I understand that there may be nowhere for them to go, but why go to places and make such a mess? Those poor people having to clear it all up too, it took the whole day.

I don't know what the answer is. I saw a documentary and it seemed so miserable being booted off as soon as they arrived anywhere. They had to pitch up on a retail park car park next to a busy flyover in the middle of the night and it was pouring with rain, it looked really grim.

I know what the answer is. They don't pitch up on school playing fields or supermarket car parks, they treat the site with respect, and they remove their rubbish at the end of their stay by paying a visit to the nearest tip. How hard can that be? Clue - not very.

Here's a novel idea. Treat gypsies/travellers the way you would treat any other person. If you think they are being anti-social, complain to the LA; complain to the noise abatement officer; complain to the environmental health; complain to the police. And if, after all those complaints, nothing changes then consider that maybe, just maybe, they actually aren't breaking the law and that your intolerance of their behaviour is being exacerbated by your bigotry.

Ahh see this ^^ is not my experience.

When they're being anti-social, many of us complain to all of those people/departments.

Numerous enquiries are made, evidence is gathered, the long and expensive eviction process is started. The travellers are eventually evicted, the expensive clean up operation starts - rarely a bigot in sight in my experience.

Then a couple of months passes (if that long) and the entire thing starts again and again and again....

Like I said, I've had 20 years of this due to the parks/playing fields/nature reserve and cemetery, being constantly camped on.

Even the old B&Q carpark had to put a height restriction thing in place to stop the caravans arriving, until it was torn down and they arrived again anyway.

The playing fields her had a locked gate, and wooden bollards, but the lock was cut off and the bollards pulled up/cut off with a chainsaw.

I don't understand it. If it was a grass verge or an unenclosed space then maybe, but a locked field that was obviously a recreational space with goalposts?

What land though msgrinch?

I think the problem is that there are not enough legal sites for them to travel to.

And I can't see that getting any better considering cutbacks etc, not to mention the UK housing crisis in general.

Having said that, there is absolutely no excuse for anti-social behaviour from anyone - traveller or not.

My dad is an Irish traveller although I was not brought up in the community. So I'm probably biased to either side depending on my mood.
The travellers in my village rub along alright with the settled families in the main, yeah every now and again there is some sort of ruckus, minor flare up, but nothing major, nothing that you wouldn't expect from any other mining village, a poor village.
Mess is tidied up, I've no idea where to, could be council bin men for all I know, horse and traps are ridden up Main Street, traveller and settled kids are in the village school together.
I think we have it rather lucky here.

We have two traveller sites within 2 miles of where I lube and you wouldn't even know they were there. No problems at all.
Some pitched up in a local park two days ago. I went past yesterday and there were piles of rubbish. Today I saw two of them climbing over a fence and stealing roof tiles from someones extension.

Last time they pitched up on a local playing field for a week and it took 6 weeks to clear the mess they made. Some travellers do not do themselves any favours

As someone not living in UK, that sounds like appalling behaviour. Everyone sounds scared of them. Do they contribute to society in any way? How do they support themselves?

Worra our police, the LA and the local traveller community have been very proactive about working together on sites, parking, health and education.

Opening dialogue rather than being confrontational has transformed the interaction between the authorities and the gypsy and traveller communities. It has been a long process. Our local LA working group on these issues has been running for over a decade. And importantly, it has always involved representatives from the traveller and gypsy communities.

Part of the problem with other LAs is that they start from a position of confrontation and without speaking to gypsies and/or travellers.

My experience of the travellers that I have knowingly met has sadly not been good.

When I taught, the children from the travelling community attended school perhaps 15% of the year? The children massively acted out and who could blame them? They didn't understand the work the other children were doing and understandably didn't like being shown or helped away from the group. An illiterate 9 year old can't be blamed for hating school when their ill attendance isn't their fault.

My Saturday job was in a department store. There was a day where travellers came in. Despite security, store detectives and staff, the theft and damage in the short time they were in the store was to the tune of about £10k

As a little girl I remember hearing my mother sigh "oh no, there's gypsys by Tesco again" and I asked her what she meant (Enid Blighton meant I was convinced that all travellers were like jimmy and his family in the circus books )

Her response "some people who live in caravans don't take care of where they live so only stay for a little while. They go from place to place leaving mess, making it dangerous and costing people lots of money to fix."

Perfectly fair. Some people are like that.

If they tidied up After themselves and behaved neighbourly and left areas as they found them, didn't trwpass on private land etc. then people would stop having a problem with them. They don't help themselves

I agree Kate

As I said upthread, my local council provides huge wheelie bins and a refuse collection service (at no cost to the travellers). They also send people to make enquiries about their general health and welfare, and their children’s education.

However, it doesn't seem to make much difference particularly to the amount of rubbish often left strewn around and some of the other unspeakable things - for example faeces and in one recent case, the bodies of 3 dead dogs that appeared to have fought to their deaths.

Even so, I will still pull anyone up who puts down a whole race of people based on the actions of some of them.

Even if the 'some' is what we in this borough have mainly experienced.

My son started primary school in a village with a lot of travellers and I honestly had no preconceived ideas. But I was so relieved when we moved house so he could move schools.
There was a lovely traveller boy in DS's class. But most were aggressive, disruptive and rude. I knew that one of the older boys had bullied DS a bit but he's only recently told me that the boy put his hands round his throat and squeezed so hard DS thought he was going to die. He was 5 at the time and it's taken him two years to tell me that...
I've experienced racism - saying that enough is enough is not racism.