Travelling Ahead: Your Rights
The booklet is designed to help young Gypsy Travellers overcome many of the problems that they face on a daily basis. There is advice on bullying, education entitlements and places to live.
Copies from Save the Children Wales,Phoenix House, 8 Cathedral Road, Cardiff, CF11 9JL. j.davies@savethechildren.org.uk
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This is Who We Are
Download pdf from Children’s Society Website (121kb)
This is Who We Are (2007) highlights the extent of racial abuse aimed at children and young people from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities in England. Eight out of ten of those questioned (86%) had suffered racial abuse. Nearly two-thirds (63%) had been bullied or physically attacked.
Many of the respondents admitted they felt socially excluded and wary of telling other people about their background, and that they resented how the word “Gypsy” can be used as a term of abuse. One English Gypsy girl told a researcher that people “drag their children away, like we have AIDS or something”, while another young person commented, “we don’t like it when it’s said like a name call that’s just racist”.
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Atch Poggering Mande – Stop Bullying Me!
The Speak Out project explores the issue of Racist Bullying of Travellers in school and gives advice on combatting it.
The Speak Out project CD contains interviews with young Travellers, telling of their experiences of racist bullying.
This CD can be obtained from;
Margaret Wood Team for Traveller Education CPDC, Foster Road Trumpington, Cambridge, CB2 2NL 01223 508700 Email: margaret.wood@cambridgeshire.gov.uk.
Sticks and Stones Film
How do young Gypsy and Irish Traveller Children deal with racial abuse they encounter? From name calling, to physical abuse through violent and fatal attacks. This Video documents the experiences of young Gypsy and Irish Traveller children. Produced by East Sussex Traveller Education.
Available from FFT’s publications service
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“Stop Bullying Now”: A guide for Gypsy and Traveller children
Leaflets can be obtained from:
Scottish Traveller Education Programme, The University of Edinburgh, Holyrood Road EH8 8AQ.
Newspaper Articles
- In the BBC News article called “I feel like I’m being pulled back”, Chantelle says that She’s tried over the years to hide her identity as a traveller while at school, and sometimes she even “talks English” to escape the bullying. But her own accent usually leads to the cries of “pikey” she is all too accustomed to hearing. Read the article here
“It would start with name-calling, a string of obscenities flung at Lisa Devers as she arrived at school each day. Then the violence would begin, elbows in the ribs, shoving on the stairs, punching, kicking, scratching, spitting. Lisa is 15 and the child of a travelling family. She has attended, and left, four schools in the space of two years and will never go back. She has had her nose broken and is partially deaf after one particularly vicious beating. She wants to be a beauty therapist and knows she needs qualifications, but the bullying and intimidation are more than she can bear”.
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Travelling Plight, The Guardian Newspaper, 2001.
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Websites
- Check out the Anti-Bullying Network: www.antibullying.net in Scotland. There is a Fairground Girl on the website called Amy. See her story:http://www.antibullying.net/ypamy.htm
-The website believes that children and young people have the right to live, to play and to learn in environments with a non-bullying ethos. www.anti-bullyingalliance.org
