The State's War on Romani Women and Families in the UK

Unmasking a brutal, systemic assault by the British state on Romani families, the escalating rates of child removal in England constitute cultural genocide. This practice, explicitly defined by Article II(e) of the UN Genocide Convention as 'forcibly transferring children of the group to another group' (UN, 1948), demands critical examination. From a Marxist feminist perspective, complemented by the Roma Rising perspective, this state-sanctioned campaign represents a contemporary iteration of centuries of anti-Romani oppression, meticulously designed to dismantle a family structure that fundamentally challenges the reproductive mechanisms of capitalism and the patriarchal norms it upholds. Romani women, as primary cultural bearers and caregivers, find themselves at the brutal intersection of this attack, leading a revolutionary movement for change and rights, exemplified by initiatives such as Roma Rising.

From recent figures, a stark reality emerges: in 2009, approximately 30 Gypsy/Romani children were in England's care system; by 2023, that figure had surged to around 600, a twentyfold increase in just over a decade (Anglia Ruskin University, 2024; Research in Practice, 2024). Across some English local authorities, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) children now represent up to 10% of those in care, despite comprising less than 1% of the child population (Anglia Ruskin University, 2024). These figures reveal a systematic targeting, rooted in five centuries of state attempts to eliminate Romani people as a distinct group from British society, echoing the chilling precedents of eliminationist policies that anti-fascist struggles have historically confronted.

Historical Foundations: Five Centuries of State Violence and Capitalist Control

Laying down a grim precedent for state control, Tudor legislation effectively blueprinted this cultural erasure. The Egyptians Act of 1530 declared it a felony to be an 'Egyptian' (Romani person) in England, followed by the Egyptians Act of 1554 (sometimes referred to as 1562 or 1563 due to subsequent amendments or related legislation) which escalated penalties, stipulating execution for any 'Egyptian' remaining in England for more than one month, whilst their children could be seized and "placed in service" with English families (Cressy, 2016; Taylor, 2014). This was not child welfare but social engineering, driven by the needs of an emerging capitalist economy for a disciplined, settled workforce. Nomadic peoples, refusing wage labour and practising communal living, fundamentally threatened that project. Historian David Cressy (2016) documents that Tudor policy was explicitly eliminationist, aiming "not simply to control Gypsies but to ensure their disappearance as a distinct group." Thomas Acton's observations, as presented in the original source material, underscore a persistent legal precedent: Romani families are deemed inherently unfit, and their children require 'rescue' (Acton, cited in Greenfields et al., 2024). Five centuries later, that logic continues to operate in family courts across Britain.

Moving beyond Tudor statutes, Victorian 'child-saving' movements, while ostensibly philanthropic, further pathologised working-class and Romani families, obscuring the poverty created by industrial capitalism (Greenfields et al., 2024). The Industrial Schools Act 1857 disproportionately targeted Romani children for offences as minor as vagrancy (Shado Mag, 2024a). Writing in 1884, Friedrich Engels argued that the bourgeois family, founded on the "open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife," exists to reproduce class relations and facilitate property transmission (Engels, 1884). Within this structure, the husband is the bourgeois, and the wife represents the proletariat, with women's unpaid labour subsidising capitalist accumulation (Engels, 1884). The first class opposition, Engels argued, coincided with the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage (Engels, 1884).

Operating differently from dominant norms, Romani families raise children collectively within extended kinship networks. Economic practices emphasise mutual aid over individual accumulation. Nomadism rejects the binding to property that capitalism requires (Greenfields et al., 2024). While there is diversity in family structures across Romani communities, a common thread challenges the isolated nuclear family ideal. Mary Davis, in Women and Class, argues that "the ideology of domesticity which emerged in the nineteenth century was not a natural development but a deliberate construction designed to discipline working-class women... Women's unpaid labour in the home... is essential to the functioning of capitalism, yet it is systematically devalued and rendered invisible" (Davis, 2020). Davis's analysis is vital here; she demonstrates how the nuclear family structure serves capitalism by isolating reproductive labour within individual households, making women's work invisible whilst ensuring each family unit bears the cost of reproducing the next generation of workers (Davis, 2020). For Romani women, this intervention is intensified by racism; their mothering is deemed suspect because it occurs within family structures, extended, mobile, communal, that challenge dominant social organisation (Greenfields et al., 2024). Systematically, Victorian institutions removed Romani children, placing them in industrial schools where their language was prohibited and their identity erased (Shado Mag, 2024a). This was cultural theft, enacted through state and philanthropic power.

With the close of the Second World War, the 1948 Children Act granted local authorities extensive powers, powers which for Romani families became mechanisms of destruction (Celcis, 2024). Social workers, operating within frameworks that positioned Romani culture as inherently harmful, pursued removal over family support (Greenfields et al., 2024). Justifications persist today: 'inadequate housing', disregarding the state's failure to provide legal sites, exacerbated by the repeal of the Caravan Sites Act 1968 by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which criminalised nomadic life (Law Gazette, 2025; Commons Library, 2024); 'educational neglect', ignoring severe racist bullying and institutional discrimination, with Department for Education research finding Gypsy/Romani pupils have the highest rates of persistent absence largely due to institutional discrimination (Foster & Norton, 2012; HEPI, 2022); 'chaotic lifestyle', a euphemism for nomadism; and 'domestic violence', weaponised uniquely against Romani women, with extended family involvement reinterpreted as 'failure to protect' (Greenfields et al., 2024). The 1967 Plowden Report reinforced stereotypes of Gypsy and Traveller cultural deficiency, stating: "The problem of the children of Gypsies and other travellers is in many ways the most difficult of all... Many of these children come from families where educational values are low or non-existent" (Plowden Report, 1967). This provided ideological justification for continued separations. Engels argued that the bourgeois family is maintained by the private property system to reproduce class relations (Engels, 1884). Romani families, with their collective practices and refusal of nuclear isolation, threatened this mechanism of social control, and the state's response has consistently been to break them apart.

Scotland's 'Tinker Experiments': State-Sanctioned Cultural Genocide Through Forced Separation

Throughout the period from the 1940s through the 1980s, Scottish authorities implemented forced settlement programmes explicitly designed to compel Gypsy/Traveller families to abandon nomadic life, with child removal as the enforcement mechanism (Scottish Government, 2025a; Picken & Bissell, 2025). Independent research, commissioned by the Scottish Government in 2023 and led by the University of St Andrews with contributions from the University of Aberdeen, found clear evidence of widespread institutional discrimination amounting to 'cultural genocide' in these policies, colloquially known as the "Tinker Experiment" (University of Aberdeen, 2025; Picken & Bissell, 2025). The Scottish Government (2025a) documents systematic policy informed by this research: "From the 1940s onwards, policies were implemented across Scotland with the explicit aim of 'settling' Gypsy/Traveller communities. These policies involved threats of child removal, forced relocation to inadequate housing, and systematic discrimination." Churches, charitable organisations, local authorities, police forces, and the UK government's Scottish Office all participated (Scottish Government, 2025a). Children removed were typically placed for adoption with non-Traveller families, with no provision for maintaining cultural connections (Mcdonagh & Bacchus, 2024).

The enforcement mechanism of forced separation was brutally clear: comply with settlement or lose your children. Families were explicitly warned that continuing a nomadic life would result in their children being taken. Often, those who complied were housed in substandard accommodation, and any subsequent "outgrowing" of these inadequate spaces was then used as further evidence of unfitness. The children, severed from their families and culture, suffered profound and lasting harm.

Powerful survivor testimonies illuminate this gendered dimension of cultural genocide. One survivor recounts the devastating impact: "They came and they just took the bairns. Didnae matter if you were a good mother or no'. If you were Traveller, that was enough. They said we couldnae look after them right, living the way we did. But it was them that wouldnae give us proper sites." (Testimony cited in Scottish Government, 2025b)

Another survivor describes the intergenerational trauma: "My mother never got over losing her weans. She blamed herself her whole life. But it wasnae her fault, it was them, the authorities. They wanted rid of us, wanted to make us into something we werenae." (Testimony cited in Scottish Government, 2025b)

As Davis argues, women's reproductive labour, both biological and cultural, is essential to community survival yet systematically devalued and targeted by the state (Davis, 2020). Romani mothers bear the psychological burden of loss whilst being blamed for conditions created by state policy. Targeting mothers disrupts the community's capacity for cultural and social reproduction, creating wounds that span generations.

While Scottish First Minister John Swinney delivered a formal apology on 25 June 2025, acknowledging that "what happened to Gypsy Traveller communities was unacceptable" (Swinney, 2025), this apology has not been accompanied by material reparations (Picken & Bissell, 2025). Without compensation, family reunification support, and binding commitments to address ongoing discrimination, such apologies remain symbolic rather than transformative.

Contemporary Crisis: Escalating Disproportionality and Cultural Destruction Through Forced Separation

Demanding scrutiny, the twentyfold increase in Romani children entering care reflects systematic discrimination. Research published in 2024, Come to us in a peaceful way: Improving experiences of Roma families with children's services in England (Greenfields et al., 2024), documents that social workers are significantly more likely to pursue removal rather than family support when working with GRT families. Professor Margaret Greenfields highlights how "long-standing stereotypes and racism perpetuated by media representations" fundamentally shape professional judgements, creating "a unique set of obstacles to their fair and impartial treatment" (Greenfields et al., 2024).

This pattern reflects what Engels identified as the bourgeois family's function: to reproduce class relations through the disciplining of children into accepting their position within capitalist society (Engels, 1884). Romani families, raising children collectively and practising economic mutual aid, disrupt this reproductive function. As Davis argues, when women perform reproductive labour outside nuclear family structures, they become targets for state intervention designed to enforce conformity (Davis, 2020).

Bearing examination, the reasons cited for removal reveal this dynamic: 'inadequate housing' typically means families reside on unauthorised encampments due to local authorities' failure to provide legal sites or repeated evictions (Greenfields et al., 2024; Law Gazette, 2025). 'Inappropriate cultural practices' reframes behaviours like co-sleeping or extensive extended family involvement, practices common across many cultures, as indicators of risk. As Davis notes, "Middle-class standards of child-rearing, which emphasise privacy, individual bedrooms, and nuclear family isolation, are presented as universal norms rather than class-specific practices" (Davis, 2020). This policing of motherhood, Davis argues, "is always classed and racialised. Women who mother outside bourgeois norms—particularly women of colour and working-class women—face surveillance and punishment that middle-class white women do not" (Davis, 2020). By performing reproductive labour within communal, mobile structures that defy bourgeois norms, Romani women become intensified targets for state intervention.

Testimonies from affected families reveal the insidious nature of this cultural genocide. A Roma mother interviewed for the Come to us in a peaceful way research stated: "The social worker came to my house and she looked at everything like it was dirty, like we were animals. My children were clean, they were fed, they were loved. But she saw we were Roma and that was enough. She wrote in her report that our 'lifestyle' was not suitable." (Roma Mother, cited in Greenfields et al., 2024)

Another mother described cultural misunderstanding: "In our culture, the children sleep with the parents when they're small. It's normal, it's how we keep them safe and close. The social worker said this was 'inappropriate'. She said I was putting my children at risk by having them in my room." (Romani Mother, cited in Greenfields et al., 2024)

These accounts demonstrate how Romani cultural practices are positioned as inherently harmful, poverty created by structural racism is reframed as individual parental failure, and resistance to assimilation becomes evidence of unfitness. Once removed, Romani children are typically placed with non-Romani foster families who possess no knowledge of Romani culture. This forced separation leads to rapid language loss, severance from extended kinship networks, and the internalisation of shame regarding their identity (Brooks, 2012). This outcome is central to the genocidal process. Romani feminist scholar Ethel Brooks powerfully asserts that "if you go after the children, then you take away that community's future" (Brooks, cited in Romaniarts.co.uk, 2021). Brooks theorises how child removal functions as internal colonisation, a mechanism through which European nation-states attempt to eliminate Romani people without explicit violence (Brooks, 2012). Engels argued that the family under capitalism serves to transmit property and reproduce class relations across generations (Engels, 1884). By forcibly removing Romani children and raising them outside Romani culture, the state eliminates not just individual identity but the community's capacity to reproduce itself socially and culturally. As Davis notes, "The control of women's reproductive capacity, both biological and cultural, is central to maintaining racial and class hierarchies" (Davis, 2020). This is why targeting mothers is strategic; Romani women are the primary transmitters of language, cultural practices, and community identity. By removing children and blaming mothers for structural conditions, the state punishes resistance to assimilation, disrupts cultural transmission, and disciplines future generations into accepting that Romani family structures are inherently inadequate.

Romani Agency, Resistance, and the Fight for Self-Determination

Far from passive victims of this pervasive state attack, Romani women and communities stand at the forefront of a revolutionary movement for change and rights, actively engaging in anti-fascist work and advocating for their communities. Initiatives like Roma Rising, a community support group, embody this resistance, promoting Roma history and empowering Romani and Gypsy people in workforce, social services, and the health industry (About the user, 2025). This active struggle against systemic oppression resonates deeply with the broader historical fight against fascism and eliminationist ideologies, highlighting that resistance to cultural annihilation is a core tenet of anti-fascist praxis. Romani feminist scholars like Ethel Brooks theorise from within the community, arguing that Romani feminism requires 'a fundamental rethinking of how we understand gender, race, and class,' recognising that Romani women's experiences are shaped by anti-Gypsyism in ways irreducible to other oppressions (Brooks, 2012). Damian Le Bas, in The Stopping Places, documents how even Romani people who achieve educational and social mobility cannot escape structural targeting of their families (Le Bas, 2018). This collective agency, cultural resilience, and political organising are vital in challenging the state's attempts at cultural erasure.

Addressing Complexity: Child Safety and the Systemic Failure of Protection

Acknowledging the systematic discrimination and cultural genocide inherent in child removal practices, this analysis firmly establishes these truths. Yet, it is crucial to address the legitimate concern that some children, in all communities, may indeed need to be removed from their families for safety reasons due to genuine abuse or severe neglect. This assessment does not argue for the abandonment of child protection as a concept. Instead, it critically interrogates the application of child protection frameworks, particularly when they disproportionately impact marginalised communities like Romani families.

The problem does not lie in child protection being inherently flawed; rather, its implementation is deeply embedded in systemic racism and cultural bias. As highlighted by Professor Margaret Greenfields (Greenfields et al., 2024), "long-standing stereotypes and racism perpetuated by media representations" fundamentally shape professional judgements, creating "a unique set of obstacles to their fair and impartial treatment." This means that while individual social workers may act with genuine concern for a child's welfare, their actions are often constrained and informed by frameworks that pathologise Romani culture and reframe structural issues as individual parental failings.

Often, for Romani families, the justifications for removal stem from conditions created by the state itself or from a profound misunderstanding of their cultural practices:

• 'Inadequate housing': This frequently arises because local authorities fail to provide legal sites, or families face repeated evictions, criminalising their nomadic life (Law Gazette, 2025; Commons Library, 2024; Greenfields et al., 2024). The fault lies with systemic housing failures, not necessarily parental neglect.
• 'Educational neglect': Romani children experience severe racist bullying and institutional discrimination in schools, leading to high rates of persistent absence (Foster & Norton, 2012; HEPI, 2022; Greenfields et al., 2024). The issue is discrimination within the education system, not an inherent lack of educational value within Romani families.
• 'Chaotic lifestyle': This euphemism often targets nomadism itself, a refusal of geographic fixity and bureaucratic monitoring, rather than genuine harm (Greenfields et al., 2024).
• 'Domestic violence': This is uniquely weaponised against Romani women, with extended family involvement sometimes reinterpreted as 'failure to protect' (Greenfields et al., 2024). This demonstrates a cultural misinterpretation that leads to punitive rather than supportive intervention.

Thus, the criticism that some children need to be removed for safety reasons finds acknowledgement here. However, the disproportionate removal of Romani children and the nature of the reasons cited strongly suggest that the system is not primarily responding to universal instances of severe harm, but rather to perceived deviations from dominant cultural and class norms. This constitutes a systemic failure of child protection to serve all children equitably, instead becoming an instrument of cultural assimilation and control. The solution lies not in ignoring genuine safety concerns, but in radically transforming the frameworks that currently perpetuate cultural genocide.

The challenge is not to dismiss child protection but to fundamentally transform it. This requires moving beyond a deficit model that pathologises Romani culture and instead adopting culturally sensitive frameworks that prioritise family support, early intervention, and the empowerment of Romani families. This would involve:

• Anti-racist Training: Comprehensive and ongoing anti-racist training for social workers, legal professionals, and the judiciary, specifically addressing anti-Gypsyism and Romani cultural competence.
• Culturally Informed Assessments: Developing assessment tools and practices that understand and respect Romani kinship networks, child-rearing practices, and nomadic traditions, rather than imposing middle-class, sedentary norms.
• Community-Led Solutions: Prioritising and resourcing Romani-led organisations and community support groups to deliver culturally appropriate family support services, fostering trust and collaboration.
• Material Reparations and Support: Implementing material reparations for historical injustices, ensuring adequate and culturally appropriate housing (including legal transit sites), and providing robust financial and practical support to prevent child poverty and family breakdown.
• Family Reunification: Investing in culturally sensitive family reunification services that prioritise maintaining Romani children's cultural identity and connections to their extended families.

As Margaret Greenfields argues, meaningful change requires not merely policy reform but fundamental transformation in how British society perceives Romani people (Greenfields et al., 2024). This transformation must extend to the very foundations of child protection, ensuring it becomes a tool for genuine welfare rather than an instrument of cultural genocide.

Conclusion

The state's attack on Romani women and families in the UK, manifested through the disproportionate and forcible removal of children, stands as a brutal instance of cultural genocide. Rooted in centuries of anti-Romani prejudice and driven by the imperatives of capitalism to control and assimilate populations that challenge its structures, this systematic destruction targets the very reproductive capacity and cultural transmission of Romani communities. Through a Marxist feminist lens, we see how Romani women, as the bearers of cultural identity and reproducers of community, become primary targets. While acknowledging the universal need for child safety, this assessment argues that the current child protection system, deeply flawed by systemic racism and cultural bias, disproportionately targets Romani families under justifications that often misinterpret cultural practices or stem directly from state-created inequalities. The resilience and active resistance of Romani communities, particularly Romani women, in organising and advocating for their rights, offers a powerful counter-narrative. A truly just society demands not merely an acknowledgement of these historical and ongoing harms, but a fundamental restructuring of child protection frameworks to ensure they uphold the rights and cultural integrity of Romani families, rather than contributing to their erasure.

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