In the past week, a story was reported in the news whereby a blonde, blue-eyed young girl living with Roma parents in a Roma community in Greece was noticed by authorities as looking markedly different from her parents. This difference in physical appearance led to an investigation whereby the child was determined via DNA tests to be biologically unrelated to the adults/parents caring for her.
What followed in the media was an eruption of prejudicial and unexamined assumptions about phenotypic similarity between parent and child. The prevailing theory seemed to be that the Roma parents had kidnapped the child from presumably similar-looking parents — a theory that has deep roots in prejudice and myth about the Roma people (aka Gypsies). As of today, the story appears to be more complicated than what authorities originally theorized. Although still early, it appears that the child’s biological Roma parents may have voluntarily given her up for adoption, although questions about what that means and whether payment was involved remain unanswered. Hopefully, these issues will be investigated and a resolution will be found.
As we move forward, however, it is worth examining the uproar surrounding the case. In particular, the assumptions about parental-child physical similarity and the rights of authorities to forcibly investigate “obvious” differences are chilling. Indeed, the increasing number of mixed-heritage families, some of whom we discussed in a recent post, will inevitably increase the numbers of children who look markedly different from their parents. This case, however it turns out, will be deeply unsettling to many of these families. A recent NPR article discussed some of these ideas.
Indeed, these concerns are not theoretical, as the uproar appears to have contributed to at least one other case in which authorities in Ireland removed a child from the home of a Roma family b/c of inconsistencies in physical appearance (the child was blonde and the parents were not). In the latter case, DNA tests showed that the physically different looking family was indeed biologically related, and the authorities sheepishly returned the child to the family. Apparently, this is not an isolated case.