The 2019 International Coalition of Children with Incarcerated Parents (INCCIP) conference entitled, ‘When a parent is incarcerated: International perspectives on a child’s journey’ and held at Huddersfield University on 12-14 August 2019, included a workshop focusing on Roma and Traveller children of prisoners. The workshop set it’s aims on reckoning with the intersection of two pressing issues facing the European milieu—the challenge of parental imprisonment and the marginalisation of Roma & Traveller groups.
Roma & Travellers—umbrella terms that represent multiple population groups, including Sinti, Calé, Dom, Gens du Voyage and Gypsies—are among the most marginalised minority population groups in Europe, with a long history of persecution and statelessness that continues today, and which partially accounts for vast over-representation of Roma & Travellers in European prisons. Poverty, discriminatory policing, lack of access to education and housing, and stigmatisation are all persistent challenges that Roma face and that contribute to this over-population. In this current moment especially, the rise in xenophobic rhetoric of right-wing populist movements has again seized upon Roma & Travellers as scapegoats for societal ills, stigmatisation that, when compounded with the stigmatisation of parental imprisonment, can bear heavily upon the shoulders of Roma & Traveller children.
The purpose of the INCCIP Roma & Travellers workshop was bifocal:
(1) To present and discuss the findings from two reports prepared by Rachel Brett for COPE: Children of Roma and Traveller Prisoners: A Short Guide (2017)and Roma & Traveller Children with a Parent in Prison: A Follow-Up Report with Case Studies & Recommendations (2018); and,
(2) To learn about the experience and interest of others with regard to Roma & Traveller prisoners and their children.
Among others, the workshop participants included a handful of representatives from UK prisons, including one from the Department of Corrections, who during the second half of the workshop offered interesting perspectives on the subject of Traveller prisoners, specifically. Representatives of HMP Dovegate, where approximately two-thirds of the population is Traveller and the population of Roma is growing, have found it beneficial for both Traveller and non-Traveller groups to have separate family visit days to accommodate for large family sizes. A representative of HMP Oakwood discussed the effect of having on staff a prison officer from the Traveller community, namely that the others from the community relate to him and feel as though sanctions are made fairly and without discrimination.