Not rarely, people of East-European origin, which are not Rroma and who engage in criminal activities, are identified as Rroma.Īnother important aspect is the striking poverty of many minority groups in Eastern Europe, often even big parts of the entire population. Therefore, there is a picture of criminal Rroma, which is actively produced and spread by public actors as the police, un-reflected media and public persons, which builds on prejudices and lacking knowledge about Rroma.
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More importantly however, it was criticized that criminal activities are often hasty and uncritically attributed to Rroma, even though most people are not capable of identifying the language Rromanes or other markers of Rroma identity. The participants agreed upon the insight to differentiate between Rroma identity and the criminal activities – begging or more explicitly organized begging, is prohibited in many Swiss cities. The discussion started with the topic of Rroma being publicly present as beggars and what backgrounds and motives there are to this activity. The participants of the discussion were Stefan Heinichen of the Rroma Contact Point Zurich, Mustafa Asan, a Swiss-Macedonian dual citizen and Rroma, Alexander Ott, supervisor of the immigration authorities of the police corps Bern, Julia Kuruc, social worker for the women organization “Flora Dora”, Brigitte Hagmann, supervisor of the section West-Balkans of the DEZA and Martin Heule, a folklorist.
![maischberger mediathek maischberger mediathek](https://www1.wdr.de/fernsehen/ich-stelle-mich/sandramaischberger100~_v-HintergrundL.jpg)
The television program “Der Club” of the Swiss national television company arranged a discussion about the topic of Rroma as “hostile others”, appearing in public only in connection with negative events.