Chaotic Lives…
Posted by meenu on Friday Mar 12, 2010 Under Reality Unleashed...
In the city of Madrid there are a bunch of children belonging to a poor minority living at the margins of the society! And these are not just children, they are the children who earn a good deal money on their own, instead of going to schools they steal money and valuables from the people of the city! They live at a small place on the outskirts of southern Madrid which is infamous as Spain’s largest gypsy town. A place which has no sanitation with rubbish thrown all over the place. They have electricity though, one that they manage to steal as well! This gypsy town looks like some slum of India but here there are more than 242 families who came to this city to make money. These families have more than 500 children, however only 150 actually go to school. With rats all over the place this place stinks! Children and women make a living here through all sorts of stealing and men hardly bother to work. The men smoke cigarettes and eat the food and buy drinks with the money their children and wives bring. They while around during the day, indeed the most careless way of living!
95% of the gypsies are Romanians. The children steal and everyone knows this, but these children cannot be punished as per the Spanish laws. So they roam around free. Girls are an article of wealth for the family as well, for they are sold into marriages for nearly 7000 to 10,000 euros! The value of the girl child increases if she is good at stealing and earns more money as a result! Untouched virgin girls are valuable as well, especially if she also knows stealing! Marrying off under aged children is illegal in Spain, but the culprit families manage to maintain secrecy of the marriage.
The police take these children to the rehabilitation center where they will get education and counselling, but soon after the center leaves the children out and they are taken back to the same exploiting families!
This is not a unique phenomena of crime cycle happening just in Madrid, but it is spread wide across many leading big cities of Europe. Like in Milan there is a whole gang operating. Near the Milan Central Station nearly 50 gypsy children are controlled by one person and they steal from almost everyone who pass the station or the street! It became a very common incident there and hence the police started to monitor and identify the children involved. After 7 months of hard work they finally managed to trap them. The children are the puppets of the controllers whose orders they follow. Both men and women are a part of this racket. There are several levels to this type of stealing operation. At level one there are the young adults on street. At level two there are the people picking up the children from the streets. And in the end the combined earnings of all these little thefts cross nearly half a million euros, that is by all the children combined together!! This gang lives at some suburb location and the money earned here is sent back to Romania. The worst part is that the family is constantly a part of all this, it is they who encourage the children and in certain cases force them to steal!
In this suburb of Milan there are nearly 500 people who thrive on these earnings. Over 50 children have been kept here in captivity, under terrible conditions! When the police raided the place a few years back they recognised the captivated children as the thieves of the Milan Central Station! These were sent to the rehabilitation center. Unfortunately all the controllers, except one, escaped! Of all the adult controllers who were arrested in Milan and Romania nearly a 50 of them got punished through a court trial. They were sentenced four to fourteen years of jail. After this trial a total of 51 illegal gypsy towns were ordered closed by the Mayor of Milan! This was the seventh time that the gypsy towns were cleared! These families always manage to come back and re-establish their settlements on the outskirts of the city!!
One NGO that works for the welfare of the gypsy families, in helping them to lead meaningful and decent lives. The Casa Della Carita’ is an organization helping these gypsy families. They teach these people to clean and keep themselves clean. They explain to the families the need for their children to go to schools. They also provide for them subsidised flats in the city, free food, clothing, and tutoring for the children!
At the heart of Romania stealing is a tradition! In the beginning of the 90s gypsies went towards the west to steal. They would earn lots of money in euros and dollars and send it back home. The gypsy town is full of palaces built through the money earned by stealing in those rich western countries!! Today the problem is no more limited to just the cities like Milan or Madrid. The gypsy thieves have reached an international scale! They are getting their hands on more and more cities of the world and for them stealing has sort of become a respectable profession, something they are proud of!! This is no more a national problem. It is an international emergency now! With little children getting their lives destroyed at the hands of the cruel controllers, who on the other hand treat these little innocent children as money making machines is a very serious issue!! It is time that people wake up to the situation and act in all possible ways. They are children after all and like any other child they too deserve proper education and a decent living! The best tools to fight this malice is through awareness and serious mass level action!!
(Inspired from the BBC Documentary on Gypsy Child Thieves by Liviu Tipurita)














