The hair color doesn't mean anything to me, as you may know, a lot of black people have albinos in the family. Two really dark parents can have a tow headed, blue eyed child and we just accept it because it's normal. With black people you can't go by skin and hair color to determine parents. I guess that goes for them too.

Do we really still call them Gypsies? Really? Is that what they prefer?

However, they seemed to have pictures and interviews. Just didn't really feel it was reputable enough for LBR.

Its actually better than when outsiders try to use other terms and get it wrong. So its okay to use it as long as its not used in a derogatory manner.

I would hate to offend somebody by calling them a racial slur or something. I prefer to know what they call themselves or like to be called.

Each identify with their own name and spelling hence the confusion over the correct terms, it also depends where in the world you are as some terms arw used in a derogatory manner depending where you are.

But Bulgarian officials suspect Sasha sold the youngster to the highest bidders – a group of child traffickers.

They believe a shady Bulgarian middleman known as Michalis and his prostitute partner then touted Maria around central Greece before selling her on for 1,000 euros – about £850.

SNIP
Detectives believe the couple were planning to put the youngster up for sale as a child bride. In some Roma communities girls commonly marry at 12 and their families get a hefty dowry from the new in-laws.

Fair-skinned Maria would have been a prized “investment”.


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assuming that was what happened the first time.

She needs to be with parents who won't view her as a potential profit making item. So do all children.

... even if some exchange of cash is involved in an adoption. I know a lot of couples here in the US who are more than willing to pay for medical and living expenses to adopt an unwanted baby, and I consider it more along the lines of charity in most cases (as well as enlightened self-interest -- if mama's healthy, baby's healthy). If some woman went around trying to sell her kid, I wouldn't judge a couple for adopting it as their own and giving the woman some money to help her find her way. My judgment, if I were called to make one, would have everything to do with how the couple treated the newly adopted child.

and do home visits with social workers to determine the parents' fitness and well-being for raising adopted child. Even then they get it wrong.

This is outright child trafficking which is outlawed.

Sure, they may "screen" -- but often the deciding factor is the credit score, I have little doubt.

But there is a very questionable practice involving private adoptions of newborns that really can't be stopped I don't think. One of my best friends, (I've known him since I was five and he asked me to give the eulogy at his mother's funeral) got his girlfriend pregnant, and they decided to go for adoption. She ended up finding a couple, not through an agency, that paid for her living expenses for the last six months of her pregnancy and three months postpartum (they asked her to pump and send breastmilk during that time). They also paid for all of her medical care. He got to meet them and they seemed very nice, and very desperate for a baby... and very, very wealthy. He knew that his kid would have a better life there, so he didn't contest the adoption.

She later decided to do surrogacy to make a living for several years. (Edit to add: they split up before she actually said she was pregnant, and "girlfriend" was a stretch. He doesn't have that bad of taste now.)

Yes, it happens. And when it comes to foreign "charities" and adopting babies from overseas, that's adding another layer of middlemen making money off of children. It's exploitation in its own way.

This was a statement she made to police?

We were just thoroughly lectured by our resident DU expert on Rom people that it is a central principle of their culture not to tell the truth to authorities, and that it would be genocidal to expect them to do so.

So, on that basis...

I have always respected you as a poster but to diminish the fear of pogrom is weak, would you do the same to someone of jewish extraction who talked of the real fear of the past rehappening.

Only if we have no other choice is how we usually do it.

So its taken real seriously in the community as being cast out is a big deal. What i find funny is that the same people who would support african americans being distrustful of the autjorities or jews being fearful of another holocaust deny the same support to the rom.

Like they have no reason to be suspicious of authority. I shake my head.

Apparently in the case regarding the infant boy, one article said he was taken when the very young couple took him in for medical treatment. That really bothers me, and I hope they show that couple leniency if there were no signs of abuse or neglect.

An author I fancy had a character suggest that the best way to deal with being captured and interrogated by the enemy was to lie as creatively as humanly possible, because eventually under torture the truth will come out but you can hope to have muddied the waters enough that they can't figure out which story is the truth. I'm glad the lady in Bulgaria has been willing to speak up instead of leaving the couple who raised Maria out to hang, but I can see them trying to protect her and let it be her decision to break anonymity. Formal adoptions often place great value on that anonymity, and I can see it being important in informal adoptions too. Blood does not always make a family.

I had wondered if all the stories were being put out there to cover up the real one. DNA will tell.

Real names have power and are not given freely.

Aside from cultural taboos regarding names, I could see them wanting to protect the birth mother's privacy and let it be her choice to come forward. Especially if she was going to be accused of selling her child to them.