“A child died at the weekend,” a Roma woman in Harehills, Leeds, said on Monday. “Police came to take him and he jumped out of an upstairs window and died. The authorities have covered it up.”
Where has she heard this? “TikTok.”
Some said it was a baby and he fell accidentally. Some said it happened on Friday, others said it was the weekend. Some said it happened in Bradford and that it was several weeks earlier.
But no version of the story is true.
West Yorkshire police said there was no such incident in Leeds or Bradford, and the local ambulance service has no record of it either. There is no photo or video and no first-hand accounts. It is simply a conspiracy theory that has taken particular hold in marginalised groups.
A week on from the unrest in which a police car was flipped on its side, riot police pelted with missiles and a doubledecker bus reduced to a burnt-out wreck, concerns about the trustworthiness of the authorities are still rife among marginalised communities.
The disorder, triggered by police helping social services remove children from a Roma family into care, may have been short-lived – it seems nobody in Harehills is keen to repeat it – but the issues that sparked it have not gone away.
Simona Lazar, the chief executive of the advocacy group Union Romani Voice, said the story was easy to believe when it was met by silence from the local authorities – and it had led to a lot of genuine distress. “The local community is so upset,” she said. “If it’s false information, the authorities need to come out and say, ‘Look, this is not true.’”
She said one of the issues among Roma people is that they come from countries where police are more heavy-handed and authorities more corrupt and discriminatory, and so they carry this mistrust with them to the UK.
Language and cultural barriers are another issue, organisations said – it is harder for non-English speakers to get reliable news and official information – but greater than that is a feeling of discrimination.
Steffie Banu, the chief executive of another Roma advocacy group, Roconect, said: “The Romanians in the UK are already a minority here, but then you have this Roma minority in the Romanian community. So basically they are a minority inside a minority in this country.”
On Tuesday, the family at the centre of the row that sparked the unrest were present in court at a hearing to determine whether it was possible to place the four children in the care of extended family.
The parents in the case were joined in support by many other family members, something that is unusual in family court, where there is very little space for supporters to wait.
Anyone who did not have a role in the proceedings was asked to leave the building, something an advocate complained amounted to discrimination, which he would be submitting a formal complaint about. He said: “In Roma families, decisions are made with the involvement of everyone. That’s what they don’t understand.”
Banu said it could be jarring for people who value community so strongly to live in a more individualistic society.
She said: “Family is the most important to the Roma people, not the career, not making money, not position in society, but family. It is their greatest treasure and focus in life.”
Roma groups said there were plenty of examples of discrimination by social services and police. Roma children make up a disproportionate number of those in care and Roma women are overrepresented in prison, which critics would say is a direct result of this. In the case of the Harehills family, complaints were made about their social worker, who was later removed from the case.
Lazar said more training was needed for police and social services, but more also needed to be done to help Roma families integrate into communities and feel welcomed and respected.
“Some of them don’t behave to UK standards, but they need support,” she added. “They’re lovely when they receive support, but if someone is saying to them ‘You’re the worst,’ they will behave like they are the worst.”
