Hi,
I just wanted to add a wee bit of extra information - I think that we should remember that no documentary is totally unbias and this one in particular is focussing on the very different aspects of traveller culture because the shocking and contraversial will pull in more viewers. In the first session of the Scottish Parliament, the equal opportunities committee commissioned a report on the lives and issues facing gypsy travellers in Scotland, and as part of my job at the time I got to read through a lot of the oral and written evidence presented by travellers to the Committee. It offers quite a different picture than this programme. I think there is a number of things I think haven't been addressed, and instead of helping outsiders understand travelling lifestyles I have seen through my facebook friends and people I have spoken to that it is actually causing people to be even more hostile, if that's possible. I do have a couple of specific issues:
The programme really hasn't shown the hostillity shown to traveller children when they go to school, not just from other pupils, but from teaching staff. The biggest reason traveller childrendon't return to school isn't due to being pulled out by their parents so they can clean, it's because of the bullying and discrimination that their kids face. Also, it is extremely difficult to give a child a stable school life if they are constantly being evicted from their sites due to planning disputes and so on. Some traveller communities have set up schools and training facilities for their children within sites, but again it is very difficult to sustain this if there is the constant threat of eviction. Reading some of the stories about the treatment of traveller children in schools made my hair curl, and there is no way I would ever willingly put a child of mine through that. While it is a parent's responsibility to ensure a child is educated, it is a local authority's responsibility to ensure the high quality of that education, and to ensure that every child in their area has access to it. Administration difficulties are not an excuse at all- you can be damn sure they would find them if they thought they owed them money.
I do think that the costumes and in particular the way the children were dancing was really innapropriate - also the thing about grabbing. However, the way to address this is not to demonise the culture or (as I suspect may be the case here) put it on telly to be pointed at like a circus freak show. The only way you can change practices like that is building up trust between communities, not by pushing them even further apart.
There are not enough sites for gypsy travellers and the sites they are given by the local authorities are substandard wasteland where most people wouldn't let their dogs live. In many case travellers have no choice but to park up in laybys and car parks, because there is nowhere else for them to go. Even if they do wish to buy/rent houses, very often they are priced out of the market, or just refused becasue of who they are. I thought the lady who said in last weeks show that the land they would use is being sold off to supermarkets had a good point. Why should we, as non travellers have any say over whether people should travel, much less try to force people out of doing so through taking land away from them? If travellers suddenly got the upper hand, and started forcing us settled people into static caravans I'm sure that we would be shouting about our human rights pretty quickly.
I think that there is a lot of discussion about travellers on this site, and in the media in general, but what surprises me a little is that there are no travellers speaking for themselves. I do think that a lot of people are passing judgement without ever expecting to have to justify it to a member of the community they are passing judgement on. If the reactions to this programme are what I have seen in my small circle are universal, I think its likely to cause even more distrust and seperation between communities that historically have co-existed, and shown equal respect o each other, and that seems to me to be a huge wasted opportunity.
One of the things that the evidence brought home to me was that gypsy travellers are the only ethnic group in Britain who it is socially acceptable to discriminate against. I would say that some of the people who have commented on the travellers should try substituting the words indian, paki or chink where they have said traveller and see if they still feel comfortable with what they are saying.
If you'd like to have a look at the evidence I was referring to you can find it here:
www.scottish.parliament.uk/business/committees/historic/equal/or-00/eo00-1302.htm#Col687
sorry for the huge post but its something that has always been close to my heart.