Why discriminate against gypsies

Throughout my teens and adulthood, I have experienced so many instances of racism and prejudiced views. Anti-Gypsy rhetoric is an acceptable everyday racism.

I am constantly having to shrink or dilute my ethnicity to be more palatable to others. Racism and poor treatment against Gypsies, Travellers and Roma people is nothing new.

Half a million Roma people were killed during the Holocaust, for instance. Roma are the biggest ethnic minority within the European Union yet often get unfavourable treatment and are very rarely represented fairly.

Many European countries to this day still have such things as segregated schools for Roma children, blocked access to housing registers and children being separated from their families by authorities. On home turf, we have our own issues.

When your property is a caravan that serves as your home, this cannot be seen as anything but an attempt to erase us from existence. Many illegal sites exist because councils fail to provide adequate housing or approve planning applications for legal sites for Gypsies and Travellers. The travelling community is a term used to describe people with a nomadic lifestyle, known usually as Gypsies and Travellers. Skip to navigation Skip to content Skip to footer. Top links Housing benefit. Top links Template letter to raise a grievance at work.

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Download references. This research received no funding from any agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

HW and SD both participated in the conception and design of this review, data extraction and analysis, draft writing, and final approval of the manuscript. HW was responsible for implementing the search strategy. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Correspondence to Helen L. Reprints and Permissions. Watson, H. Discrimination against childbearing Romani women in maternity care in Europe: a mixed-methods systematic review.

Reprod Health 14, 1 Download citation. Received : 26 September Accepted : 07 December Published : 05 January Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:.

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Skip to main content. Search all BMC articles Search. Download PDF. Abstract Background Freedom from discrimination is one of the key principles in a human rights-based approach to maternal and newborn health. Objective To review the published evidence on discrimination against Romani women in maternity care in Europe, and on interventions to address this. Data extraction and synthesis Standardised data extraction tables were utilised, quality was formally assessed and a line of argument synthesis was developed and tested against the data from the grey literature.

Results Nine hundred papers were identified; three qualitative studies and seven sources of grey literature met the review criteria. Conclusions There is evidence of discrimination against Romani women in maternity care in Europe. Plain english summary All childbearing women in Europe are entitled to be free from experiencing discrimination in maternity health care. Introduction There is now wide acceptance of the relationship between human rights and maternal and infant health and wellbeing [ 1 ].

Background Human rights are basic values that are essential to human dignity [ 6 ], and concern the empowerment and entitlement of people with respect to certain aspects of their lives, including their sexual and reproductive health [ 7 ].

Within human rights law discrimination is defined as; Any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference or other differential treatment that is directly or indirectly based on the prohibited grounds of discrimination and which has the intention or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of Covenant rights [ 8 ], p. Table 1 Prohibited grounds of discrimination Full size table.

Table 2 Countries belonging to the Council of Europe Full size table. Table 3 Inclusion and exclusion criteria Full size table. Table 4 Grading criteria for quality of qualitative studies Full size table. Results Search outcome Figure 1 gives the results of the search. Flow diagram of study selection. Full size image. Table 5 Characteristics of the included published research studies Full size table. Table 6 Characteristics of included grey literature Full size table.

Table 7 Qualitative data themes Full size table. Discussion Limitations Considering only studies published in English may have introduced language bias and excluded relevant studies published in other languages [ 41 ]. There were limited data that considered the perspectives of health providers, and the CERQual assessment of the review findings resulted in medium and low confidence results for all the findings The authors of the grey literature often did not specify the methodology that had been adopted, and quality assessment could not be undertaken.

The experiences of Romani women in a global context The experiences of childbearing Romani women can be contextualised by a wider body of global evidence concerning disrespect, abuse and mistreatment of childbearing women in healthcare facilities and poor maternity healthcare professional behaviours, which include; physical, sexual and verbal abuse, stigma and discrimination, lack of communication or information, neglect or abandonment of patients, refusal to deliver services, lack of informed consent, lack of willingness to accommodate traditional practices, breaches of confidentiality or privacy and detention in facilities [ 17 , 18 , 68 ].

Conclusion This review has demonstrated that Romani women in Europe experience various forms of discriminatory mistreatment within maternity care and barriers to accessing maternity care. References 1. Google Scholar 2. Google Scholar 3. Google Scholar 4. Google Scholar 5. Google Scholar 6. Google Scholar 9. Google Scholar PubMed Google Scholar Chapter Google Scholar Book Google Scholar Article PubMed Google Scholar Article Google Scholar Acknowledgements Not applicable.

Funding This research received no funding from any agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Availability of data and materials The data for this review is available as referenced in the text. Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Consent for publication Not applicable. Ethics approval and consent to participate Not required for this review. Watson View author publications. View author publications. Additional files.

Additional file 1: Search Strategy.