Anti-nomadism, institutions, and the geographies of childhood

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 71-94

  Vanderbeck, Robert M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CHILD WELFARE; EDUCATION; GYPSY PEOPLE; INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK; NOMADIC PEOPLE;

EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; EUROPE; UNITED KINGDOM; WESTERN EUROPE; WORLD;

EID: 14044249381     PISSN: 02637758     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1068/d333t     Document Type: Review

References (111)

1. For the purposes of this paper, I use the term 'Traveller' to encompass members of the traditionally semi-nomadic groups in Britain including Romanis, Irish Travellers, and Scottish Travellers. For my purposes here, I am not including New Travellers (sometimes referred to as New Age Travellers.
2. see Kenrick D, and Clark C, 1999). Issues of terminology can be controversial. Some Romanis, for example, embrace the term 'Gypsy' but reject 'Traveller'; others consider 'Gypsy' to be pejorative and prefer 'Traveller', 'Romani', or 'Romanichal'. My use of 'Traveller' is not intended to imply that Romani, Irish Traveller, and Scottish Traveller populations are culturally identical.
3. The much-discussed Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 increased the power of local authorities and police to evict people from unofficial encampments while repealing the duty to provide official stopping places (see Murdoch, 1999). For some Travellers, the result is that they are travelling more frequently as the duration of their stay in particular areas declines, further hindering the prospects of enrolling in a local school. The act has increased the already strong pressures on Traveller families to move onto official sites (often essentially poorly equipped state-sponsored ghettos) or into permanent housing. Travellers seeking to live in caravans on land they own frequently encounter local opposition and significant difficulties in obtaining planning permission (see Kenrick and Clark, 1999).
4. The Convention on the Rights of the Child applies to all persons aged 0-18 years, and at the time of writing every state in the world had signed the treaty apart from Somalia and the United States.
5. It is important to remember that in late-19th-century Britain the value of compulsory education in general was still a highly contested point (see Hendrick, 1997).
6. A similar point is made by Mayall (1988).
7. The provision applies to families who travel for occupational reasons, and thus also includes fairground, circus, bargee, and other families. The provisions for reduced attendance still exist (see Kiddle, 1999, page 50).
8. Some of these tensions relating to education were present in Gypsy politics at an international level as well. At the First World Romani Congress in 1971, some Eastern European Roma apparently expressed the view that nomadism impeded education, and to quote one delegate, "School attendance ... should be made compulsory not only in theory but also in practice" (quoted in Puxon, 2000, page 108).
9. In some cases, education welfare officers and social workers work in close coordination with Traveller education services, but are not formally part of the Traveller education services staff.
10. It is interesting to note, however, that Blair's interdepartmental Social Exclusion Unit has to date shown little interest in issues related to Travellers, despite the widespread use of the rhetoric of social exclusion at national and local levels.
11. See Ní Shuinéar (1997) for a discussion of discourses of Traveller genetic inferiority. Some recent government documents have also attempted to challenge notions of inherent Traveller intellectual inferiority (for example, Ofsted, 1999). Ofsted (1999) suggests that many schools have 'unrealistically low' expectations of the abilities of Traveller children, but is not explicit about the source of these persistently low expectations.
12. Some Traveller education services had developed, or were in the process of developing, means of lobbying for aspects of child welfare (in relation to evictions, for example) but others actively avoided doing this.
13. This is not to deny the reality of material poverty for many Traveller families (see Kenrick and Clark, 1999). Rather, what I would emphasise is that current educational discourse rarely makes an explicit connection between the declining economic fortunes of some Traveller families and oppressive state controls which can severly limit the nomadic practices on which Traveller economic activities often rely.
14. Traveller education practitioner Kiddle (1999) invokes a similar vision. Writing about her experience living temporarily on a Gypsy site in the 1970s while conducting educational research, Kiddle notes what she sees as the fundamental difference between Travellers' interdependent notions of identity and her individualised ones: "I became increasingly aware that the family/child relationships which I saw were fundamentally different from the majority view in our society. The society in which I had grown up gives the highest priority to enabling each individual child to develop its potential to the utmost. This difference in attitude raised basic questions that lay at the core of our educational work" (page 31). What this obviously denies are the myriad ways in which "The society in which [she] had grown up" routinely impedes the 'potential' of many of its young people (whether based on ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, and so forth), and implies that Traveller children are in comparison stunted by their upbringings.
15. No reliable national-level statistics are available on the prosecution of Traveller families. A court conviction for truancy can result in fines, imprisonment of parents, and other sanctions (Department for Education and Employment, 1999b)
16. Department for Education and Skills, 2002). The law does allow for the possibility of parents educating their children "otherwise than at school" (that is, to home educate), an option that some Traveller families have exercised. There is considerable debate, however, regarding what constitutes an acceptable home education. At the time of research and writing, some practitioners were actively seeking to have approval withdrawn for families to home educate whom they thought were not providing 'appropriate curriculum'. During fieldwork, I noted that knowledge among Traveller families of the right to home educate varied greatly, and a number of practitioners I spoke with stated that they consciously did not inform parents of this right ("We like to keep them in the dark about that", as one stated), although this was not universal practice.
17. The Department for Education and Employment has recently changed its name to Department for Education and Skills.
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