gypsy travellers shame page

Stop Shaming to Save Lives: The Traveller Movements campaign to tackle public shaming.

#Stop Shaming campaign is a social media project running throughout August that reports on public shaming towards and by Traveller communities and addresses the devastating impact shaming has on Traveller lives.

“The idea of public shaming has been around for centuries, but technology and social media has taken it to new heights.” Says The Traveller Movement, who has started a community-led social media campaign to tackle public shaming within Traveller communities and raise awareness using videos and blogs and to spread the ‘Stop Shaming’ message.

On August 1st The Traveller Movement launched the Stop Shaming campaign. Throughout August videos will be shared on social media of Travellers speaking about their experience of shaming and the change that needs to happen within the Traveller communities.

The key message behind this campaign is,

Pauline Anderson OBE, is a member of the Traveller community and Chair Person for The Traveller Movement. When asked about the impact of shaming within the Traveller community she said,

“Shaming is causing absolute misery in people's lives and happens within families and communities. It happens to both young people and older people. It happens when people discuss people's lives and pass it on as gossip and is designed to hurt and put people down. I imagine it makes some people feel better than others to put them down but it is cruel, inhumane and for the so called religious it is against all Christian teachings.”

Traveller Movement says that this campaign is about exposure and raising aspirations, not asking people to change their culture, but to have an informed choice and accept people within the Traveller communities that have individual identities. The main purpose of this campaign is to save lives.

With the intention of understanding the research behind this campaign, Travellers’ Times interviewed CEO of The Traveller Movement, Yvonne MacNamara.

The Traveller Movement organisation is made up of Travellers and non-Travellers. During the interview, Yvonne wanted to point out that similar to previous projects, the research conducted throughout the campaign is led by the Traveller community while the non-Traveller members of the organisation are part of the background research. She also explains, the community-led research was done through ‘peer researchers’. The peer researchers made questions and interviewed Gypsy, Roma and Travellers’ across the UK to find out how shaming was happening within families and communities. From the interviews, The Traveller Movement was able to recognise that GRT people are hesitant to talk about lived experiences to non-GRT people so, for the Stop Shaming campaign The Traveller Movement felt it was important that the campaign was a community-led project.

“Traveller Movement was the vehicle and was able to pull it together but, it is 100% community driven and researched by the community”, says Yvonne MacNamara.

From the community-led research, The Traveller Movement found that most people didn’t want to voice their lived experiences of shaming, because they were not represented within their communities. Yvonne explained, individuals that had seen or was victim to shaming pages brought them to the organisations attention, which allowed them to see first-hand how people were being shamed online and proceeded with removing them.

Overall the research conducted by The Traveller Movement and reports by Traveller individuals showed that social media shaming pages are encouraging Travellers to publicly share and humiliate other Travellers that fit a list of characteristics. These are including but not limited to; Travellers who identify as LGBT, young Traveller girls and women that are single, young Traveller girls and women leaving relationships or getting divorced, single mothers, victims of domestic abuse and, people seeking education.

Pauline Anderson further explains, “People are being shamed because of their looks, the lack of money or a job, their choice of partner or because they are divorcing a partner or leaving a domestic violence situation. People are even being shamed for being educated.”

It is evident that there is a mental health crisis in Traveller communities and suicides are happening, especially among the Irish Traveller community. The Traveller Movement feels it is significant to state that there are external factors outside of these communities that lead to suicide, but the research conducted for the campaign focuses on shame pages as an internal factor that has led Travellers to take their own lives.

In the 2020 report, ‘The public shaming game within Traveller communities’, The Traveller Movement clarifies how the shame pages are operating on Instagram and Facebook. The report states that ‘Traveller Shame’ Instagram accounts are usually set up by Traveller men who share pornographic pictures and videos of young Traveller girls and women, and that the victims are tricked to share their pictures or are secretly filmed. On Facebook, the report states that ‘fake pages’ are being made by Travellers to scandalise and shame the victims, sharing pictures, videos and writing posts pretending to be the victim.

You can read the full report here .

One of the voices from the Stop Shaming campaign was Dan Cash, an Irish Traveller who spoke bravely about his story of coming out as a gay man and how the shame pages targeted his identity. Travellers’ Times approached Dan to get an insight to how this effected his life.

"My family and friends disowned me from the community. I felt very alone and when I moved to the UK my life was turned upside down. The shaming started on Facebook, I had lots of fake pages made of me while still trying to get used to my new life. It was such a horrible experience and I couldn’t explain to any one as it was my own people doing it."

A big part of the Stop Shaming campaign is the reporting and removal of the distressing shame pages similar to the one Dan Cash experienced. Yvonne MacNamara explained that through ‘trusted flagger’ status on Facebook and as a verified badge holder on Instagram, the team were able to directly report and remove the shame pages. Although, Yvonne made it clear that this was an ongoing issue as the team noticed, “As soon as one page was taken down another would pop up”. 

Traveller’s Times discussed this process further with Jenni Berlin, Partnerships and Research Manager, who was focusing mainly on the Instagram shame pages. Jenni outlines the number of shame pages she removed, while acknowledging there are a number that haven’t been recorded.

“I've been reporting Instagram Traveller and Gypsy shaming pages since I first came across them in early 2020. I went through my case notes, and according to them I've managed to get 52 Traveller and Gypsy shame pages down.”

Jenni also discussed one approach to help find the shame pages on social media, she says “We designed flyers to say we are here to help if someone is being shamed, and that please report to us if you see any shaming pages on Instagram or Facebook.

Reporting and taking down these shaming pages on social media can save lives and the Stop Shaming campaign has empowered many Travellers to be open about who they are.

Dan Cash spoke to Travellers’ Times about how his mental health deteriorated due to daily threats on Facebook, and it took Dan a lot of strength to better his state of mind. The Stop Shaming campaign is important to Dan Cash because he was given a platform to share his story and experiences, to unapologetically show who he is and that he is still here fighting for his rights and his community.

Stop Shaming campaign has given a spotlight to courageous individuals that have uncovered their lived experiences of shaming within their families and communities. The Traveller Movement hopes the campaign will encourage people who have or have not been shamed to condemn public shaming by posting a video with the hashtag #StopShaming.

Liza Mortimer/TT News

lead photo Stop Shaming logo (c) The Traveller Movement

Wed 3 Jul 2024

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‘The ignorance about us can be deadly’: Gypsy and Traveller women talk about the stigma they face

For gypsies and travellers, dependent on family ties and already facing prejudice, the isolation of the covid lockdowns has hit particularly hard.

In 2020, 45-year-old Tina Cooper from Greenwich in London was unable to make her annual journey to the Appleby Horse Fair in the Cumbrian market town of Appleby-in-Westmorland, which hosts Europe’s largest gathering of Gypsies and Travellers every year in the first week of June.

The event is a spectacle; many of those attending arrive in traditional horse-drawn bow-topped wagons from all over the country and ride their horses in the River Eden.

Due to coronavirus, Appleby was cancelled for only the second time in 250 years. The last cancellation was in 2001 during the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak .

The pandemic was hard on Tina, a mother of five who is herself a Traveller. The lockdowns cut her off from everything she relied upon and made it impossible for the community to function as it usually does.

“Not being able to mix with other people in the community the way I used to and not being able to go to traditional fairs has been very challenging,” she explains. “That is how our community comes together.”

There have, until recently, also been no large weddings, christenings or confirmations, all of which are milestone events around which the Traveller community congregates and celebrates.

“We have really big extended families, but we are very close knit,” Tina explains. “There’s always someone popping over to see you or help with the kids.” And so, not being able to mix, or have friends and relatives over was, Tina says, “really, really depressing”.

According to the latest available data, there are 58,000 Gypsy and Traveller people in England and Wales with a further 4,000 in Scotland. However, the Government has acknowledged that this is likely to be a severe undercount, not least because a tick-box for “Roma” was not included in the 2011 census (census results from 2021 are yet to appear).

Estimates as to the community’s true numbers range from between 100,000 and 300,000.

Jenni Berlin is the partnerships and research manager for The Traveller Movement , an organisation that promotes and upholds the rights of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people.

Sadly, she explains, the Traveller community is still subjected to great prejudice and racism.

As i recently revealed, the holiday firm Pontins was investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission after whistleblowers found that it was keeping a blacklist of mainly Irish surnames as part of an explicit policy of refusing bookings by Gypsies and Travellers to its holiday parks.

“That was just the tip of the iceberg,” Jenni says. “We regularly hear that people from within the community are banned from pubs and restaurants or subjected to racism . It’s an everyday occurrence for a Traveller. Children get discriminated against in schools.

“If a Traveller walks into a shop they are followed by security for no reason other than the stigma that ‘all Travellers steal’.”

“And,” Jenni continues “the media only seems to be interested in pushing negative stories about Travellers parked in car parks or whatnot; 99 per cent of the coverage this group receives is negative.”

Jenni adds that as a result of this ignorance and lack of education about the realities of being a Traveller, “80 per cent of people in the community actually hide their ethnicity. So, actually, most people wouldn’t even know that they have interacted with a Traveller because they were probably concealing their identity to avoid racism and discrimination.”

You don’t have to look far to see evidence of this. In 2019, Conservative MP Sir Paul Beresford described the arrival of Travellers in his constituency, Mole Valley in Surrey, as being like “a disease” .

In 2020, OfCom received 888 complaints about Channel 4’s Dispatches programme The Truth About Traveller Crime , which Travellers felt had stigmatised and dehumanised their community .

In 2021, The Times writer Matthew Parris wrote a column in which he argued that Travellers ought not to be given ethnic minority status.

The feeling of being marginalised by society at large compounded the feelings of isolation many Travellers felt during the pandemic, Jenni explains.

On top of all of this prejudice, one of the biggest misconceptions about the Traveller community, says Jenni, is that, today, most live in flats or houses and not, as most media coverage suggests, nomadically or on sites.

“There can be a crisis of identity for Travellers who don’t live on the road,” she explains.

“They’re almost expected to prove that they are a ‘real’ Traveller. Being at home without family and friends has reinforced that.”

No matter where or how they live, though, English Romany Gypsies and Irish Travellers are lawfully recognised ethnic minorities and protected by law.

Data is patchy but, according to the housing charity Shelter , approximately 75 per cent of Gypsies and Travellers in the UK live in bricks and mortar. Jenni puts this proportion higher.

Tina is one of that number. She was forced to move away from some of her community (who do live on the road) after making the decision to leave an abusive relationship.

For this reason, events like Appleby are of even greater importance to her today, which is why not being able to attend them due to coronavirus was such a wrench.

“In a house you are more confined than you are on a site because when you’re in a trailer, every morning you have to go out and you’re surrounded by people – other people’s children, your own family – but in bricks and mortar you’re a lot more isolated and I really felt that intensely during the pandemic.

“It was a very big struggle for me,” she says. “It was really hard on the children, too; they weren’t seeing anywhere near the same number of people as normal.”

It’s estimated that 75 per cent of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller women experience domestic abuse at some point in their lives. However, there are no large-scale studies on this and Jenni stresses that within the community there are cultural barriers faced by victim-survivors who want to leave or seek help.

When you’re a Traveller like me extreme hate speech is an everyday occurrence

Traveller Christina Kerrigan, 34, from London is also a survivor. No longer in an abusive relationship, she is now working as a domestic abuse trainer with The Traveller Movement.

“The ignorance about us can be deadly,” she laments. “Last year, I know of a case where a young Irish Traveller woman was murdered because we were contacted by the local council for the area where she lives and invited to sit on a Domestic Homicide Review panel.

“They had only just, at the very last minute, realised that the victim was an Irish Traveller. When I spoke to them, they were not aware that Travellers could even live in houses so it didn’t occur to them. Had they known, this girl might have received better support and might be alive today.”

For female Travellers who have experienced domestic abuse and moved away, the wider community is even more important. Tina remarks that “not being able to see your cousins during lockdown or visit extended family and friends who live in other places or on the road for company and support was really difficult, particularly when you’ve already had to change how you live”.

Abbleby went ahead this year, though slightly later than usual due to the Government’s unlocking timetable. Tina was unable to attend because of her aunt’s funeral.

A good few people didn’t survive Covid,” she says. “It’s a big shame. But everyone I’ve spoken to who went to Appleby was just so happy to see it back up and running.

“And, even though it was a sad occasion, friends and relatives came to the funeral from all over – Germany, England and Ireland. It was good to be back together.”

Tina feels a lot less isolated now. Before the pandemic she usually went to a wedding every month. Now they’re back up and running again too.

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