More than half a century ago when my parents and I moved into the house I stll live in our nearest neighbour was a Traveller woman living beside the road in a wagon with her children. She sent them to school, the neighbours did what they could to support her - reading letters, ironing clothes for interviews, handing over home grown vegetables or fresh eggs. As the children grew older various members of her second family (she'd been married in her early teens, widowed, married again, had more than 20 children) drifted into criminality, drawing the youngsters in after them. Although the people living nearest her suffered some petty theft, past kindness protected us to some extent, but there was a lot of more serious stuff further afield. They also, of course, beat their mother.
Time passed, arrests, AIDS, other horrible stuff happened. She, meanwhile, had moved into a council house, the wagons were burned. Then she adopted two of her grandchildren and went into full-on protector mode. Took out a barring order against all the extended family for a ten mile radius. Saw the grandchildren through secondary school, one of them to third level, very rare for Travellers then. And when she died, she'd left strict instructions not to publish the funeral details but to invite selected members of her first, respectable (and largely settled) family and her local friends.
Being a criminal isn't hereditary, both those grandchildren have raised their families to be law-abiding contributors to society.
It took huge courage, and support from the Parish Priest and from a guard living locally, but she won a better future for those children. Ann, RIP.
It's a generalisation, but Traveller women have very different aspirations for their children, and attitude to education from men. Maybe their voices need to amplified.