Roma migrant children in Catalonia: between the politics of benevolence and the normalization of violence

ABSTRACT

In this article, I engage with the current debate on Roma migrant children. Taking Catalonia as a case study, I tackle the separation of Romani children from their parents and the completion of pay-to-go schemes for marginalized Romanian Roma families. The focus lies within the allegedly humane logic of state institutions and civil-society organizations that reflect structural oppression and unveil everyday racism against Roma as a group. Specifically, I seek to explain the relation between the “voluntary return” practices and programs for child protection. The benevolent practices towards the migrant Roma families are considered to be grounded on child well-being. At the same time, the common and widespread practice of pay-to-go for poor Romani migrants push the families into a vicious circle of forced mobility. Therefore, I employ the theories of humanitarianism, and the critiques on the politics of benevolence, to reveal the institutional racism against the Romani migrants.

KEYWORDS:

• Roma
• child protection
• voluntary return
• humanitarianism
• Catalonia
• mobility

Introduction

When civil servants approach migrant Roma families, “the children disappear”, a clerk working in social services in the metropolitan area of Barcelona confessed (Interview Ana and Valeria 2014).¹

In this paper, I intend to point to the relation between the policies towards Roma² migrant families and the practices of individual-based “voluntary” return³ led by the Catalan administration. These practices inflict violence and stigmatize Roma as a group. Inspecting simultaneously the national and international legal elements of child protection, voluntary return practices (such as pay-to-go schemes), and national regulations on migration, I outline the context in which public institutions in Catalonia are forcefully structuring the mobility of Roma families from Romania. I analyse the ways in which the involved civil servants and social workers implement and encourage these procedures under the guise of institutional benevolence. Specifically, the civil servants and social workers activate the child protection mechanism to ensure the immobility of the family, doing so in order to enable the enforcement of the voluntary return procedures. I, therefore, question humanitarianism and the politics of benevolence rearticulating institutional racism through concepts such as aid, benefit, charity or vulnerability enacted towards Roma migrant families.

Firstly, I contextualize the current migration of Romanians to Spain and the return policies, mentioning the specific phenomenon of Roma repatriation in Europe, visible mainly in France, Italy, Germany or United Kingdom. Secondly, I inquire the migration of Roma and the Catalan attitudes and position, presenting some quantitative data from the Autonomous Region of Catalonia. Thirdly, my argument follows the institutional framework of the child’s protection in Catalonia, showing the incongruences between the Romanian state and the Catalan administration in interpreting international legislation, and pointing to a presumed “anomaly” on the part of the Catalan management. The hyper-dimension and rigidity of the Catalan child protection system challenge the successful integration of European citizens, in particular Romani migrants, for it institutionalizes and reinforces racist stereotypes. Finally, my findings explain the unexplored empirical connections between the practices of social services, specifically those of social benefits and voluntary returns, and the programmes for child protection whose beneficiaries are Roma migrants.

This article builds upon my field research conducted in the metropolitan area of Barcelona during the years 2013–2015. Qualitative data were mainly gathered among the implementers of programmes dedicated to Romanian Roma, using thirty in-depth semi-structured interviews, two planned discussion groups and six participant observations. These included, among others, policy-makers and civil servants in the local administration, social workers and the Romanian Consul in Catalonia. The interviews were recorded and the quotation of the text is verbatim. Although I keep anonymously the identity of my interviewees, I mention a fictional name for legibility reason. In addition, secondary sources were used for following and analysing policy documents, local authority’s programmes, municipality regulations, and international conventions signed by Spain and Romania.

The main objectives of the research have been to analyse the institutional and organizational practices towards migrant Romanian Roma families and children declared at risk by the street-level agents (employed as civil servants or operating as social workers in private organizations), as well as to analyse the understanding and support for voluntary return schemes tailored for Romani migrants from Romania. The discussions conducted left ample room for the interviewees to expose their own vision on the system where and for whom they work. Informed by Lipsky’s (1980) analysis of street-level bureaucrats, I considered their perspectives and interpretations of utmost importance for my research, as they not only justify personal actions under the guise of professionalism, but they also legitimate and reinforce their institutional function.

Intentionally, I do not mention any Roma among my interviewees, nor I evaluate Roma migrants’ opinions or positions towards the Catalan public services. Indeed, I participated in many emotionally heavy and charged situations when Roma migrant parents, having their children seized by the authorities, expressed tremendous pain and complained against the institutional violent intervention in their lives. As a form of respect towards their sufferance, I prefer not to develop on the dramatic outcomes considering to be well informed and documented by media and in academia. Acknowledging the importance of having Roma voices related to any politics or programs directed to them, I point to a visible lack: there are no Romani migrants employed in public administration or in the third sector in Catalonia. Nevertheless, my focus here is the evaluation of institutional practices for voluntary return conjoint with the bureaucratic behaviour and rationality behind the child protection system in Catalonia.

The first group analysed are the civil servants working in local or regional governmental positions, in different departments dealing with migration, child protection and social security assistance. The focus lies on the distinction between high ranked state employees having protected and well remunerated positions and street-level bureaucrats attached to ideal service models while working under precarious contracts. The second group analysed are the social workers contracted via NGOs or private companies. Usually, they are professional social workers, psychologists and interpreters, employed as unprofessional translators or mediators. The vulnerable condition of this group is reflected on the low-paid, mostly flexible and unprotected jobs, their wage being totally dependent on project-based contracts. These two groups studied represent the agents of routine public policy implementation.

My argument reveals how the necessities of a Roma migrant family are assessed and how institutions allocate the social benefits. Importantly, I question the way in which the involved street-level bureaucrats first decide and then justify the benefit of voluntary return practices for migrant families. By explaining the personal contribution of civil servants and social workers to the decision-making process of voluntary return, I describe the correlation between voluntary return practices and child protection system.

Politics of benevolence towards vulnerable Roma migrant families

I explain here the politics of benevolence as the circumstances in which the state’s apparatus underpins a certain ethics, implements practices, and develops programmes aimed to support people considered vulnerable. The politics of benevolence (Jefferess 2011, 2012, 2013; Latief 2013) designed to help “vulnerable” people is rooted in a humanitarian ethics, whereas the political acts of benevolence are fulfilled within existing racist power structures (Carmichael and Hamilton [1967] 1971). The notion of racism implicitly calls upon the debate on structural racism in Europe (Balibar 2009), more particularly acknowledging the existence of antiziganism and Romaphobia (see Agarin 2014) and how politics for Roma inclusion and the subsequent programs “not only expunges any explicit reference to racism but also condemns any attempts to bring racism up” (Maeso 2015, 64). The critics of European racism uncovers an embedded humanitarian ethics within the power structure. Hence, employing Fassin’s (2012) analysis of humanitarianism and the effect of benevolent politics, I explain those bureaucratic technics legitimizing and maintaining institutional racism (Hesse 2004). My intention is to diagnose benevolence and vulnerability as supporting the normalization of violence. These terms ideologically sustain the acts of charity, aid and compassion that I could detect within the work of civil servants and non-governmental organizations’ employees in relation to Roma migrant families. Throughout their humanitarian actions civil servants and social workers array attitudes and tactics illustrating everyday racism (Essed 1991).

On the one hand, humanitarianism portrays people as victims, transforming them into passive objects of charity rather than subjects of law and also as active subjects able to cope with their everyday life circumstances. Ticktin (2006) argues that this moralism indicates another type of politics: “humanitarianism has been transformed into a form of politics, functioning as a transnational system of governance tied to capital and labour even while purporting to be apolitical” (2006, 35). While being ethical notions, concepts such as charity, empathy, compassion and benevolence actively construct the terminology of this new politics. A whole palette of emotionality enters the political realm, expressing a common acceptance of values, norms and rules that people should follow. Therefore, the juridical regulations and methods of political implementation, which are open to interpretation, legitimize the arbitrariness of civil servants that work along the lines of humanitarianism, displaying compassion or help as their daily benevolent practices. This particular ethics is difficult to challenge, as it not only motivates the social workers and low ranked civil servants under the benevolent logic of the system of child protection, but also reflects an internalized and active reception of this benevolence on the part of Romani migrants, as manifested in the voluntary return.

On the other hand, the subject of humanitarian ethics designates the “human” with the responsibility and the capacity to “uplift an Other, who is not (yet) modern” (Jefferess 2011, 78). Seen through the lens of the coloniality of power theory, humanitarianism categorizes people according to their power positions. Considering power to be the condition of possibility of altruistic interventions and politics, I suggest that the politics of benevolence implicitly recalls the civilizing mission and that the tools and means of this civilizing mission are to be found within the institutions. Within the civil society’s welfare projects and institutional practices there are, on the one hand, those entitled to perform the civilizing missions and, on the other hand, the alleged victims, the vulnerable who become the recipients of benevolence. Catalan civil servants and social workers perform the civilizing mission towards the migrants, the Roma, acting to eradicate their allegedly “barbaric” social practices. The yardstick of measurement is the children in school, the wage labour, the health insurance or documents.

The relation between benevolence and vulnerability defines the power structure that creates a benevolent recipient, where charity (goods, acts) is directed to the most vulnerable. If help, benefit, aid and development express the politics of benevolence, these are directed to the racialized and vulnerablized subjects. The racialized recipients have been crafted to receive more help and condemned to be over-surveyed in order to ascertain their vulnerable condition. Vulnerability is associated with migration, and especially with the ethnicized Romani migrants. Roma, in particular, are defined in public policies and debates, both at European and national level, as a “vulnerable group” (Helms 2013; Maeso 2015). The governance of the Roma through programs and politics for inclusion defines them as vulnerable population in contrast with social and cultural norms. Although vulnerability appears to be more of a political notion, when used in the context of humanitarianism, it reveals its moralizing structure. The programs developed for vulnerable group should take into account the cultural or social presumed differences of the target population, thus maintaining social discrepancies and cultural prejudices.

Voluntary return: from public policy to public aid

Although an EU member state since 2007, Romania is still beneficiary and governmental provider of voluntary return politics and practices. López Catalán and Sáez Sellares (2009) have elaborated a historical description of voluntary return agreements based on the bilateral relations between the Spanish and the Romanian states. They argue that after Romania’s ratification of the Geneva Convention, Western European states have conducted massive denials of asylum seekers and consequently collective and forced returns of Romanian migrants during 1994–1998. In Spain, the consequences translated into policies that addressed homelessness by “problematizing and evicting the community, and dismantling of provisional houses as well as strengthening the institutional activity following the new foreign law (2001)” (López Catalán and Sáez Sellares 2009, 1452). This foreign law allowed the Spanish state to make policies ensuring the return of homeless and/or irregular migrants in particular to their lands of origin.

Since 2004, Romania and Spain adopted different policies regarding their cooperation in preventing the migration of poor Romanians to Spain or encouraging their voluntary return.⁴ Specifically, the multi-layered cooperation on voluntary return materialized in the documents and agreements adopted under the principles of the International Organization of Migration (IOM) by the Spanish governmental institutions (e.g. the Ministry of Labour), by the Romanian Minister Delegate for Romanians Abroad, or by the regional authorities (such as Catalonia). In the context of annual attempts to settle and continue the readmission agreements (acuerdos de readmisión), Romania and Spain have common but sometimes divergent approaches. For example, the Romanian Consulate in Catalonia has been involved in “helping” people in difficult or conflicting situations by arranging the travel documents and contributing to the payment of their one-way bus tickets. However, the main activity of this pay-to-go scheme is operated by the local or regional social services in Catalonia, as I will show.

Even though Catalonia does not have an official policy to return Romanian citizens, in 2015 one could still find instructions for potential returnees, translated into Romanian, on the Catalan government’s website. Moreover, despite the Catalan national articulation on migration enabling a universalist moral discourse of inclusion and self-declared ideal management (Però 2007), there is a common agreement and institutional practice of encouraging the return of poor Romanian nationals to their country. After Romania’s EU accession, the alarming official discourse about the “wave” of Romanian migrants driven by pull-factors (efecto llamada) belied the practice of voluntary return at institutional level. Without engaging the immigration department, the social services operate not only according to central policies, but also creatively implementing programmes. One of my interviewees, reflecting on the practice of voluntary return, said:

One of the things encouraged in Barcelona is the families’ return to their country [of origin]. SIS,⁵ a social service within the [office of the] mayor of Barcelona, one of the things that it suggests is that, understanding the situation, the families return to their country … what I think is that families that are here in a very poor situation … well, they think, if you live so badly here, why you don’t go back to your country where you will do better?

and further:

[The institutions want to] promote the return. Sometimes it is considered feasible to financially help the family to return to their country, [but] sometimes it is not [feasible] … [The civil servants] look for ways for the family to return without helping them financially. (Interview Diana 2014)

These benevolent practices of voluntary return understood as “public aid” challenge the European principle of freedom of movement (see Parker and López Catalán 2014) and reinforce the cultural prejudice of itinerancy or nomadism.

Romani migrants in Catalonia

The particular context of this paper is grounded on a well-known phenomenon of Roma ethnics’ repatriation in Europe and reflected in academic debate (Knaus 2011; Guild and Zwaan 2014). Whereas states like France successfully repatriated more than 20,000 Romanian citizens of Roma ethnicity in the last three years (Carrera 2013; Dimitrova 2014), other states prefer to disguise this type of policies and encourage local or decentralized practices.

According to the national census of Spain, out of a total population of 46,771,341 persons registered in 2014 as residents in Spain, almost 100,000 were Romanian nationals residing in Catalonia, of whom more than 72,000 are children under fifteen years of age (Bereményi 2010; Informes estatistics 2014). If one takes into account the fact that five to eight per cent of the general migrant population in Catalonia stems from Romania, the total estimated count for Roma ethnics from Romania (Gitanos del Este) would probably be less than 4000 persons (see also Pajares 2007, 243).⁶ Considering the research carried out during 2005–2009 and subsequent literature (Bustamante 2005; Prieto-Flores and Sordé-Martí 2011; López Catalán 2012), the area most populated by Roma migrating from Romania to Catalonia is the neighbourhood Sant Roc of Badalona (Metropolitan Area of Barcelona), inhabited by not more than a few hundred people. This numerical underrepresentation conjoined with the high visibility of Romani migrants from Romania in Catalonia (López Catalán and Aharchi 2012) shows Roma migrants equally as an over-studied subject and an over-mediatized object. However, statistical data are neither neutral, nor apolitical, actively producing categories, distinctions and differentiations they suggest to describe (van Baar 2011, 126–128). Moreover, while the only category of migrants is Romanian citizens, the studies refer specifically to Roma from Romania or Gitanos del Este (Vincle 2006; Projecte Tècnic 2009), a term in itself problematic.

Institutionally, the Catalan “civilizing mission” exhibits the willingness to help the migrants, the Roma families, but conditioning the aid by proofs of submissive behaviour patterns.

They [the Gallegos – Portuguese Gypsies] ask to live in a house, but they are not fully able to live in a house. ( … ) They do not have the capacity to live in a community that is not theirs. What happens … I am explaining this because the same pattern is reproduced with the Romanians … what happens is that we establish a strategy for the professionals to work [with them] on education, hygiene, training and culture and values, meaning teaching them to respect values. When you stay here, [you understand that] there are some values according to which living in caravans, where these minors are living, is not right.

Moreover, the civilizing mission is accompanied by a system of surveillance, detailed by the same civil servant:

We start the working plan with the families by putting them in social housing [(piso de inclusión)]. This kind of housing, which is given on a temporary basis, comes with a compulsory educational training. Every other day a pedagogue enters the house to investigate the domestic life, the savings, parental capacities, [and to see] about education and employment training. (Interview Clara 2014)

Being a recipient of political benevolence keeps Roma migrant families in heavy chains of a racialized and vulnerable identity. “They have to adapt … to learn the rules of the place they choose to immigrate to.” (participant observation, ROMEST 2013) The pervasive institutional racism frames the Roma migrant family as a portrait of a vulnerable group, of Roma ethnics, of migrants and poor families needing social benefits. Jefferess (2011) points that, while the discourses of security construct difference in the terms of racialized discourse, the performance of benevolence rearticulates racism and racial politics:

It is their culture that makes them live so low, that makes them live at the margins of everything. (…) The Gypsies? from Romania are pariahs, they don’t have a good relationship with the Romanians and neither do they have a good one with the Gypsies. The local Gypsies don’t have a good relationship with them. There is a big cultural difference. Basically, we agree that the Romanian Gypsies will be considered migrants [not EU citizens]. (Interview with the head of Immigration Department 2015)

The benevolent acts demonstrate a racial paternalism within the politics and civil society towards the Roma and the migrants. Sometimes, the racialized recipients of Catalan benevolence are considered already marginalized in the country of origin. This empirical research illustrates how the underlying humanitarian ethics of the Catalan administration encourages certain political acts (programmes, practices and discourses) believed to be generous towards Romani children and families.

A case of institutional dysfunction?

The truth is that, from the beginning, the system [of child protection] has been applied vehemently by the state to expropriate the children and get them out of the natural places of their upbringing, home, neighbourhood, school, friends – to uproot them, making them wander from one host family to another, and transforming the law of Legal Child Protection to a law of legally taking the parental custody from vulnerable families and systematic uprooting their offspring. (Empez Vidal 2014, 17)

The general data count approximately 3000 children in the care of Catalan administration, which is almost twenty-five per cent of all children living permanently in the custody of the Spanish state (Síndic de Greuges de Barcelona 2006; Interview with the vice-manager of DGAIA 2014).

In Spain, the formal procedure demands that a child suspected to be at risk be taken into custody by social services for child protection. The definition of a child at risk pertains to the theoretical meaning given by the Spanish Constitution (1978), the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990) and the autonomous communities’ civil laws. According to the Spanish state legislation, both the social security laws and the application norms of the child protection law are exclusively implemented and managed by autonomous communities (Comunidad Autónoma).⁷

However, according to the literature (Empez Vidal 2014), the child is perceived and legally constituted as “vulnerable”, thus in need of surveillance and over-protection. The child’s portrait does not equal a fully active subject, but rather is classified by an age span that includes humans that should be taken care of: a child “will be seen as a charity object, as a special entity that is not at the same level as the adults in his human condition” (Ruiz 2014, 26). The vulnerability implied in the legal category of the child draws upon the notion of social or civic disabled persons and appeals to a subsequent state intervention.

Whereas the child protection system is unable to give any solutions for maltreatment besides recommending the educational and/or therapeutic intervention, an entire network of economic and social interests frames and supports the administrative system. Looking to the institutional practices, it appears more important who defines the lack of adequate care, and how; who assesses children’s vulnerable situations, and how.

The ways in which civil servants and social workers define the “child at risk” (niño en situación de riesgo) shape the policies at the administrative level. Several researches and reports have attested that most of the cases of children referred to as being at risk are related to poverty (e.g. lack of housing, parents’ unemployment). Besides, a child might be declared at risk when the parents and/or children lack legal documentation (e.g. ID cards, passports), residential status (empadronamiento), or when they are not registered in the educational or health system (determined by the previous mentioned documents). When all these four measurements of administrative life of an individual are missing, the result is the equivalent of “no recognition of their official existence” (participant observation, ROMEST 2014). Additionally, migrants with children can be considered at risk when a mother begs on the streets, or when a baby is born in a family already monitored by authorities (e.g. when a family approaches social services for benefits, a unit for child protection, EAIA,⁸ would automatically be alerted). When the children are registered and labelled “at risk”, they are taken into custody by services for child protection DGAIA (General Direction for the Child and Adolescent Care).⁹ The professional educators and psychologists in DGAIA have the task of evaluating the family’s socio-economic situation and giving an initial verdict within 72 hours, and are then able to decide to keep the child in custody for a longer period, sometimes for a few months (temporary custody removal). During this period of evaluation, the professionals institute a working programme with the family, specified by the law as a step prior to the complete removal of parents’ custody.

Once the child enters the DGAIA system, the material consequences are as follows: either the family can improve its (material or moral) situation and the child is given back to the family; or the family cannot improve, or cannot attest that its situation has improved (e.g. earning money but without having an official wage). In this last case, it is up to the DGAIA civil servants to decide whether the child will return to the family or not.

The other trajectory a child can have after entering DGAIA custody is pre-adoption and adoption. If the technical team of DGAIA does not agree to the return of the child to the family, they begin the adoption procedure, especially when several conditions are fulfilled: when the child is still a baby (under two years old) – with or without the parents’ agreement; when the mother is a minor herself; when the parents agree with adoption; when social services cannot identify the parents or any other relatives. The procedure starts with the withdrawal of the parental custody. After the withdrawal, another examination follows in order for the child to be given up for adoption within a period of a few months. The pre-adoptive and adoptive procedures are highly complex when a child reaches a certain age, making it very difficult for the institution to leave the child with a foster family. Adding to the complexity is an institutional inertia that results in a high number of children living in support centres for a long time.

Administratively, the centres for child care (centros de acogida, CA) are classified on the basis of several categories, among them the age of the child, the regular or special needs of the child and the economic-managerial structure.¹⁰ Even if the institutional organogram does not reveal the proportion of externalized services, the available financial data are telling. The economic dimension reflects an awkward reality. The general cost, including the personal wages, for a child in CA custody reaches up to 130 euros per day. When a child is given to a foster family (familia de acogida), the expenses drop to less than 500 euros per month, whereas when a child is living with its biological family the state’s support is almost non-existent, only consisting of either payment for education or for the school meal.

The literature on the Catalan child protection law and system has recently become a heated topic (Mattioli Jacobs 2013; Empez Vidal 2014), particularly since media scandals have reached a tipping point.¹¹ Cases of abuse on the part of the institutions have been well documented and are no secret anymore, not even for the civil servants.¹²

Nevertheless, at the state level, two distinctive ideologies are colliding. On the one hand, while in Romania the child’s best interest is always considered to be with her/his family, in Spain, the family must first be able to ensure and demonstrate proper conditions for child development, conditions that are defined by the state. On the other hand, the protection of the state is done differently: the Spanish de-centralized system gives over to the regional governments the full right to decide upon the law’s implementation and institutional responsibility. Thus, the way the child’s welfare is defended and enacted by the Catalan government (Generalitat de Catalunya) bypasses the judge, for example when removing the parental custody (desamparo). Only after the child’s removal from the family, the parents can go to the court and contest child’s protection services decision (Aznar 2011). In Catalonia, the system works for the regional administration, and not the judicial one, to decide the removal of parental custody.¹³ This anomaly renders the system very efficient in taking away the children from the family and makes it very difficult and costly for parents to pursue family reunification.

Public aid or surveillance for Roma children?

Admittedly, the children in foster care have better housing and clothes than the biological family can afford. However, some questions remain: while parents are stigmatized and condemned for not ensuring a good life for their children, what legitimizes the public funds’ expenditure inside the child protection system? If Catalan politics declares its convergence with neoliberal ideology by externalizing almost all social services and pretending to be more economic and efficient, who is questioning its accountability within the child welfare system? How does this politics address families living in poverty, especially migrant families, exposed to “official nonexistence”?

Whereas the ethnically diverse care centres are distributed all over Catalonia, the dynamics inside the centres differ. For example, only in Barcelona is there one support centre dedicated solely to Moroccan children. As Mattioli Jacobs (2013) demonstrates, vulnerable groups continue to be overrepresented statistically in terms of having children in state custody, a discrimination against the families in poverty that run a bigger risk of having their children institutionalized. In her analysis on Romani migrants in Italy, Saletti Salza shows that “poverty constitutes, even if not indicated in the Italian law, a factor that weighs heavily on decision to estrange children from certain families” (2012, 112) and that the probability for Roma children to be given up for adoption is twenty times higher than for any other child.

According to the official data,¹⁴ a significant percentage of Roma migrant children have been taken into custody in Catalonia by social workers under the guise of child protection.

The family’s initial link to social services is made through a denunciation sent by DGAIA (expediente de riesgo), a neighbour’s call, a civil servants’ report when surveying the streets (equipo de calle), or directly, when a marginalized and poor family itself (without money, employment or house) requests social support. I asked the professionals how exactly they identify or recognize Romani migrants and how they evaluate the precarious living conditions in order to allocate social benefits, or to recommend the state custody for allegedly neglected children. Firstly, the Romani migrants’ identity was stereotypically related to their dressing codes or social behaviour. Secondly, the interviewees, both social workers and civil servants, counted several markers considered important in assessing the Romani family’s integrity: the availability of documents and the living conditions. Thirdly, a common gesture was to point one finger below the eye, meaning that once “it is seen” there are no doubts, explaining how clear the reality of living conditions was for them. A professional needs no more than just “to see” the Romani migrants and their living conditions in order to evaluate a child’s welfare situation. Fourthly, migrant parents have to accomplish tasks and obey the rules imposed by the social workers, such as accepting over-surveillance of their full time and money expenditure, educational training, required without any offer on the labour market.

(…W)e had to open the file and call this woman and tell her look, DGAIA sent us this denunciation for you, and this is something she cannot choose, because it will be this procedure of surveillance … we had to evaluate if there was a risk for this minor.

Further, explaining how the woman accepted the mandate to stay in a social house (piso de inclusion) where there was educational surveillance, she also detailed the exchange:

For the fact that she does not have to pay for the rent, not for the electricity, nor for the water, she has to accept to participate in a working plan, of which the main point is to declare the savings. This means that you don’t have to pay for the accommodation, but what we ask is that each month, from the money you will earn, well, or that you will receive as help, you can keep a bit in order to manage your way out, finding a place to live with better conditions. (Interview Anita 2015)

The social services stop helping a Roma migrant family when a child is classified “at risk”. The case is then transferred to the professional of EAIA focusing on child welfare, and the family is monitored in order to find a solution to its “problem”. The EAIA civil servants work together with NGO social workers on a case-by-case basis, coordinate the negotiations with the family under the guise of the child’s high interest (el interés prioritario del menor). The parents’ and extended family’s socio-economic status in the host country is measured. When the situation is not likely to improve within the “migration project”, the alternative championed is an attempt at a better life in the country of origin. Thus, in the following few months the parents have to demonstrate that they have acceptable living conditions for their children in the country of origin. In this case, the social workers will consider negotiating with the family towards reunification with the children and a subsequent departure to their homeland, Romania, a condition supplemented with a paid one-way ticket back.

Ironically, in DGAIA centres the common practice towards Roma children is “letting them go” whenever possible. However, when the children are too small to manage by themselves, the procedure of putting them into foster care is initiated just in order to enable the enforcement of the voluntary return procedures. The civil servants or social workers deciding whether the children should or should not stay in state custody is pictured clearly through a financial lens: one-way bus tickets to Romania cost fifty euros, so for a family of two or three children, would cost the local government a mere 250 euros, a sum which, compared to the cost of keeping a child in state custody, completely legitimized the procedure.

During the field research, I observed a split in the attitudes my respondents from civil servants group towards the topic of the research: they were either confident about their professionalism or protective regarding what they believed might reveal too much about state practices. Those in higher positions of the institutional hierarchy preferred the open approach, talking freely about the connection between child protection and pay-to-go return practices. In contrast, the lower-level bureaucrats dealing directly with the Roma communities were mostly protective towards these practices, to the extent that their statements often became contradictory, expressing an understanding of their actions either as helping the migrant families and/or as a need to fix problems in the society. Low-level bureaucrats expressed often disengagement with the political practice: “the first filter is done at the reception … [the civil servants there] technically assess if a person needs basic aid such as food or [money] to return to the country of origin”. Further during the interview the same person would defend the correctness of the social services by saying: “[when we find homeless families] we urgently allocate them in a pension and then their situation is assessed” (Interview Gabriela 2015).

The second group of respondents, the social workers employed by NGOs explained their engagement with voluntary return practices by saying that “at least they get something” meaning the transport costs to Romania, even if they declared that voluntary return seems more a “mysterious politics”. Acting as educators bureaucrats promote the return, whereas social workers personify the benevolent good-doers which indicate repatriation as the last best choice. This overwhelmingly accepted practice of voluntary return confirms the everyday racism defined by Essed as the process “routinely created and reinforced through everyday practices” (1991, 2).

Conclusion

The benevolent policies directed towards the migrant Roma families and children are considered to be grounded on the best interest of the child. By prioritizing the rights of children, civil servants and social activists render the Romani migrants unable to protect their children and family structure. At the same time, the common and widespread practice of pay-to-go for marginalized Romani migrants push the families into a vicious circle of forced mobility.

On the one hand, Romani migrants from Romania face a double standard regarding child protection. The child protection system acts forcefully over the family, immediately removing the child from the family whenever it is believed that the child lives under adverse conditions. The civil servants act under the guise of child protection not to ensure the Roma children the same treatment like for any other citizens, but first and foremost to restrict the family’s free movement. On the other hand, taking the children into state custody and offering Roma migrant families the alternative of voluntary return appeals to what Ahmed calls “forms of politics premised on being willing to be the recipients of benevolence” (2012, 163). The voluntary return practice executed under the Catalan policing of child protection representatives reveals the intentional coercion towards Roma migrant families.

The child protection system is supposedly considered rightful, whereas the voluntary return support is expected to be welcomed. These claimed right and benevolent practices of the institutions are interpreted and internalized by the social workers under the humanitarian ethics. The alleged benevolence towards migrant Roma appears to exonerate what should otherwise be considered as violent state measures: separating children from their family, sending social servants with armed guards to homeless Roma families, giving Roma children up for adoption and pressuring entire families to leave the country in return for getting their children back.

Moreover, the vulnerability of the Romani migrants and their families is translated by Catalan administration through enactment of the civilizing mission (Rohloff 2011). This “civilizing offensive” of the institutions is applied by imposing the pay-to-go aid programme under the threat of taking the children into state custody. Rather than being a public aid, the services directed to the Roma migrant children and families uncover a surveillance and disciplinary apparatus. Explicitly, these practices reflect the normalization of structural violence against marginalized Roma families. The routinized benevolent terminology, essential in defining local policies, is doubled by the concealed violent practices.

Consequently, the research shows in which way the distribution of bureaucratic techniques at different governmental levels blur the state’s legibility without substituting the state’s responsibility. The Catalan autonomous government contributes to this dynamic taking no political responsibility towards highly excluded Romani migrants. While doing so, the underlying humanitarian reason reinforces the institutional racism towards Romani migrants, rendered unable and unwilling to adapt, and expected only to be grateful.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Huub van Baar for his valuable comments on previous version of the article and to all the reviewers that helped me improve my argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council [ERC-Starting grant 336319]; European Commission's 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2013–2017) under grant agreement no. 312691, InGRID – Inclusive Growth Research Infrastructure Diffusion.

Notes

1 All the quotations from the field work are translated by the author.

2 In this text, I use the political defined term “Roma” while pointing to Romani ethnics from Romania.

3 I use here “voluntary returns” with quotation marks to challenge the mainstream understanding of the term, and particularly the supposedly “voluntary” character of these returns. From now on, I drop the quotation marks for ease of readability.

4 On 4 May 2009, Spain and Romania signed two collaboration agreements concerning labour and social security measures, where the main aim is to facilitate the entry into the labour market for the Romanian workers that decide to return to their country. The project has been further developed by FEDROM since 2013.

5 Service for social integration – Servicios de Inserción Social, Ayuntamiento de Barcelona.

6 These estimations are drawn by considering the official data of five to eight per cent of Roma ethnics in Romania and not to any other official numbers as in Spain the data forbids the collection of ethnicity information of the migrants.

7 In our case, in 1991 the Catalan administration drafted the public institutions for child protection, followed by the organic law of child legal protection in 1996, by the organic law 5/2000 for penal responsibility of the minor (which charges the DGAIA with the responsibility of delinquent minors under age of fourteen), and by the law 14/2010. The studies and reports issued on child protection and child criminality claim the necessity of administrative intervention for education without sanctions. However, the internal rules for protection and prevention of DGAIA and the minors under the age of fourteen that are imputable translate to an impossibility of intervention in the case of child delinquency.

8 EAIA are territorial units of DGAIA (general management) consisting of three to four professionals: pedagogues, psychologists and social workers.

9 Direcció General d’Atenció a la Infancia i l’Adolescencia.

10 The three types of CA are: CRAE, Centre Residencial de Acción Educativa, which is completely open; CRAI, Centre Residencial de Acción en Internamiento, which is closed, and a special unit for children considered mentally challenged. Besides these, there are several institutions in Catalonia that belong to Juvenile Justice (Justicia Juvenil) dedicated to those minors age fourteen to eighteen that are legally condemned for different crimes. The first type of supporting centres (CA: centres de acogida) address the danger that the child represents or the maltreatment that s/he was submitted to. The second type of supporting centres are split according to the age of the child. The third typology of support centres refers to their management. Although all these support centres are under the technical control and legislation of Catalan institutions, being the direct responsibility of DGAIA, the financial and professional management is distributed according to periodical bids for services. Thus, three other possibilities arise: when the whole personnel, the administrative building and maintenance costs are under DGAIA; when only the personnel is directly employed by DGAIA; or when the whole management, technical and administrative, belongs to a private company or NGO.

11 Media articles are spread over the years with dramatic cases of state abuse and forced interference of authorities in private life whenever the suspicion of maltreatment allows.

12 Although the norms establish that the support centres are open, so that the minors can leave or stay according to the law stating that there is no insoluble contradiction between the minor’s needs for protection and his/her needs for autonomy, the minors are not free to leave the centre or to disobey the rules that are imposed upon them (see Defensor del Pueblo 2009).

13 On Catalan administration rights to evoke risk situations and to revoke the parental protection see Aznar (2011).

14 The data gathered from NGOs and DGAIA rise the number at about 300 per year of Roma migrant children registered at DGAIA, going through the complete process or only partially.