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Fighting Savage Reflections

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Fighting Savage Reflections

“You think the only people who are people, are people who look and think like you, but if you walk the footsteps of a stranger. You’ll find things you never knew…You never knew….”
-Pocahontas (Disney, 1995). The films of Walter Disney touched our hearts, and reinforced moral lessons in our homes for years. Pocahontas teaches the life lesson of stereotyping and judging other cultures before you know them. The Romani Gypsy traditional child marriages have been labeled as savage and barbaric by Anglo-Saxon nations. These accusations are a one-sided story without proper understanding of why this tradition was created, or its past bitter sweet benefit to the Romani Gypsies. Anglo-Saxon territories are working with the Romani government to destroy tradition, through law and media. Should these reigning powers interfere with this cultural tradition? The painful answer is no. Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), an American social reformer and abolitionist, once said, “We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.” Slavery was the chief cause of the Romani child marriages. For five-hundred years Romani Gypsies suffered enslavement in Romania. These slaves shared many similarities with slaves in United States (US) between 1619 and 1865, (PBS.org). The Gypsies were raped and brutally beaten; young Roma girls were used for sexual enjoyment and bred like livestock. However, Roma parents unearthed a bitter social option, which the American slaves did not have. By wedding their young daughters, consummation would strongly discourage slave owners from raping the children, because they were no longer virgins and considered unclean. (Nicolae, 2009) It is imperative to understand that only a small fraction of Romania practices arranged marriages, and a lesser percentage arrange child marriages. There are many classifications of arranged marriages from; children being given varying powers of consent to arranged marriages to parents denying their participation, to simply permitting their children to wed because they “like each other,” fled, or had sexual relations. (Oprea, 2005) The Romani Gypsies aren’t the first country to practice child marriages, numerous nations around the world practice with unbelievable percentages; it is no surprise that Southern Asia leads with 48%, Africa at 42%, and Latin America trails 29%. In the advanced Anglo-Saxon nations of the US and Europe, the age of sexual consent wasn’t lifted to fourteen to sixteen (determined by state) until the 1920s; with documented ages formerly including children under ten-years-old. The U.S. public did not revisit the age-of-consent until the year 2000, which was barely modified to fourteen to eighteen. Modern day, age of marital consent in most states is eighteen. However, parental consent in states like California, and Colorado, presently has no recorded age of marital consent. In addition, even more states allow child marriages as a possibility through pregnancy. (Findlaw LLC., 2013).
Dictionary.com (Dictionary.com) states that the definition of a minor is “a person below the legal age of majority.” (Dictionary.com LLC) “Hold the phone!” The age-of-majority in all states is unanimously eighteen. Only a handful of states will recognize the individual as age-of-majority if he or she has graduated high school before eighteen. These facts produce a key question, if child marriages are legal in Anglo-Saxon territories such as the US, with parental consent and special circumstances. Why are the Romani Gypsies, considered barbaric savages for practicing child marriages? Why don’t the Roma “deserve” the right to fight discrimination because they are “abusing the rights of their own people?” The answer is culture. Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action. Many nations and their subordinating levels, have “stupid laws” that are not imposed. In Arkansas, US, a husband can beat his wife, once a month. In Topeka, AK the city government won’t even prosecute if the husband decided that wasn’t enough. (Mystal, 2011) General consensus of the U.S. public will frown upon domestic violence; they look down on other nations because it is a part of their culture, yet it is legal in their own system. What bothers Anglo-Saxon territories is that child marriages are widely accepted as a culture. It is taboo, and “different,” it must be savage. This brandishing comes without knowledge and first-hand information from the men, women, and children affected by the political topic. Imagine if the government declared that all citizens had to be vegetarian, because of some of the devastating effects of meat on the body. In conclusion, these tyrannical powers have no right to interfere with the Romani Gypsy culture.

References
Dictionary.com LLC. (n.d.). Define minor at Dictionary.com. Retrieved from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/minor?s=t
Disney, W. (Writer) (1995). Pocahontas [VHS].

Estes, Y. (2012). 4 yrs old & married in the USA? Retrieved from http://islamnewsroom.com/news-we-need/1783

Findlaw LLC. (2013). State-by-state marriage "age of consent" laws. Retrieved from http://family.findlaw.com/marriage/state-by-state-marriage-age-of-consent-laws.html

Mystal, E. (2011, October 12). Topeka! Now the best place to beat your wife! Retrieved from http://abovethelaw.com/2011/10/topeka-now-the-best-place-to-beat-your-wife/

Nicolae, V. (2003). A problem brewing: Media coverage of Roma in Romania. Retrieved from http://mediadiversity.org/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=970:a-problembrewing-media-coverage-of-roma-in-romania&catid=42:media-content&Itemid=16

Oprea, A. (2005, July 21). Child marriage a cultural problem, educational access a race issue? deconstructing uni-dimensional understanding of Romani oppression. Retrieved from http://www.errc.org/article/child-marriage-a-cultural-problem-educational-access-a-raceissue-deconstructing-uni-dimensional-understanding-of-romani-oppression/2295.

PBS.org. (n.d.). Slavery and the making of America. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/timeline/

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