Dave Howard attended the conference which explored the past, present and future portrayal of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. It was held by and , which is a magazine and website for people in the communities and those who work with them.
How can you represent people in programmes if they don’t trust you? And how can you get people to trust you, if you don’t represent them in programmes?
These ‘chicken and egg’ questions were on my mind, as I attended Media on the Move. The event, commissioned by , was intended to foster understanding between the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community and members of the media.
Damian Le Bas, Editor-at-large of the Travellers' Times
People had stories to tell of media misrepresentation, broken promises, and of harm done to them as a result. Yes, there is the ongoing travesty – as they see it – of Channel 4’s My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.
Elsewhere, it was pointed out the 成人论坛 and others often use words like ‘Travellers’ and ‘locals’ as binary opposites, as though it is impossible to be both.
Damian Le Bas of The Travellers’ Times described being asked to contribute on local radio, of waiting and listening on the line as caller after caller made derogatory or unsubstantiated claims about his community. By the time he was asked to respond, he felt goaded into anger.
‘Once bitten, twice shy’, goes the old saying.
People from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities told they feel as though they have been bitten, bitten, and bitten again, to the point where any relationship of trust with the media is near to impossible.
Mike Doherty, Editor of the Travellers' Times
My team and I know this to our cost. We run the 成人论坛’s youth outreach cohorts. We find young contributors from across UK political and social spectrums, particularly from harder-to-reach communities, and connect them with programme-makers.
Across four iterations of our project in the last three years, we have completely failed to find any young person from a Gypsy, Roma or Traveller background who was willing to be included.
We reached out, we invited in.
No luck. No one would come forward. No one trusted us.
A few years ago, a colleague and I made a Radio 1’s Stories documentary with the rapper Professor Green, hearing experiences of young people who had survived suicide attempts.
Elsewhere, I’ve recorded mums talking about how it feels to be bathed, toileted, or psychologically supported by their young carer children. Other mums have opened up to me about being physically and emotionally abused by their children.
All of these are difficult stories; the kinds of stories you can only tell if you can establish and maintain a strong relationship of trust with your contributor. I would argue that they are the kinds of stories we need to hear, if we want to understand modern Britain.
These stories can stop you in your tracks. When well handled, by the likes of Michael Buchanan or Fi Glover (and the teams around them), they can be raw, powerful, captivating - in short, brilliant.
However, if we screw up our dealings with people who have chosen to share these kinds of experiences with us – perhaps by riding roughshod over how they wish to be portrayed, by taking for granted what it has taken for them to share their experiences on air, or by breaking promises either made or implied – we shatter that trust.
In so doing, we scupper any chance of those individuals or communities ever talking to us again.
We have a lot of work to do to build a working level of trust with the country's estimated Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers.
And if Media On The Move showed us anything, it was a willingness from both sides to get started. The very fact that the 成人论坛 was hosting the first ever dedicated event to discuss these issues was warmly welcomed.
There were other positives to build on, too. 成人论坛 drama was praised, for having well-drawn, in-depth, relatable Gypsy characters, as opposed to caricatures or one-dimensional cartoon-villains.
On a more everyday scale, we were asked always to capitalise the word Gypsy or Traveller in copy, when referring to ethnicity, just as we would words like French or Chinese. One 成人论坛 producer enquired about a familiar pitfall; when captioning or introducing someone in a programme, what words should we use to describe them?
The response was delivered with a wry shrug: “Ask them. Go with whatever they tell you”.
Media On the Move was about building bridges between Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, the 成人论坛 and the media. It is often hard to define success in matters of ‘trust’ or ‘community relations', but in this instance I can give one concrete example.
I went back to Edinburgh at the end of the day with contact details in my pocket for a young Traveller woman who is happy to be approached for our next 成人论坛 Generation project.
After three years getting nowhere, I call that progress.
成人论坛 Outreach & Corporate Responsibility brings the 成人论坛 closer to its audiences - particularly those audiences we have identified as harder to reach - with face-to-face activity, community support and staff volunteering.