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Virginia Bonet Morell,

Editor (Europe)

 

FARSALA — On October 16, a blonde girl was spotted in a Roma encampment in the Region of Thessaly in central Greece. The police found the child while they searched the encampment looking for drugs and weapons. Officers’ suspicions were raised as her blonde hair, pale skin and light blue eyes, were in evident mismatch with her parents’ and the other kids in the house. She was taken to the charity The Smile of the Child  and the so-called parents were arrested with charges of abduction.

DNA tests have proved that the little girl is not related to the couple looking after her — a 40-year-old woman and a 39-year-old man. Hence, nothing is known about the girl despite the fact that she only speaks Roma, not Greek, and that she answers to the name of Maria. Anthropologists estimated that she is possibly four years old and are trying to determine her nationality and origins from her features.

The suspects have denied accusations of child smuggling but have given a range of conflicting stories. For instance, they claimed that she had been found in a blanket at birth and that her biological father was actually Canadian. Furthermore, suspicions were highlighted when it was discovered that the father already had criminal record and that the mother had two identities. In addition, she had claimed to give birth to six of her fourteen children in less than a year, which would have enabled the couple to collect €2,800 per month in child benefits given by the state.

In the last few days, two more cases of possible child trafficking related with Roma ethnicity have been found out. In the eastern Aegean Island of Lesvos another Roma couple was discovered with a baby boy who was not their own. Also, in Athens, the police have arrested a childless couple on suspicion of attempting to pass off an eight-month-old Roma girl as their own. Greece as a frontier state of the European Union has been the centre of people trafficking for a long time due to its location between east and west. In addition, since the nation’s economic crisis began, the black market of babies and illegal trade is believed to have worsened as effective state controls collapsed.

Maria’s reappearance has had a great repercussion in the international media since it enabled to raise global awareness about the issue of child trafficking. It has also moved thousands of families of missing children around the world. The parents of Madeleine McCann, the girl who went missing in Portugal in 2007, claimed that this case was a sign that children who disappeared could still be found. Also, the mother of Ben Needham, the 21-month baby that went missing on the Aegean island of Kos 22 years ago, said to the press, “We always believed that Ben’s abduction was gypsy related.” Hopefully, this case in Greece will mobilise international organisations and trigger global investigations on child abduction and human trafficking.

Image Courtesy: By fdecomite (Greek flag Uploaded by tm) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Virginia Bonet Morell

Virginia is the Europe Editor at The Global Panorama. She studies "Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies" at Cardiff University, United Kingdom. Her main interests cover current affairs, social issues and international politics. Even though she really enjoys written journalism, she would like to make a career in broadcasting and PR in the future. In her free time she loves travelling, reading and learning other languages.

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