The Securitization of the Roma in Europe by Huub van Baar Ana Ivasiuc & Regina Kreide

Author:Huub van Baar, Ana Ivasiuc & Regina Kreide
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The Entertaining Enemy in ‘Austerity Porn’

Post Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, there were a number of ‘one off’ specials. However, amid protest s from the Traveller community and complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority that were upheld (ASA Report 2012), the then Channel 4 creative officer Jay Hunt stated (without mentioning any accusations of poor quality broadcasting): ‘Entirely for creative reasons, we have reached the end of the line’.6 The next ‘line’ in popular programming in the UK then shifted to a mass interest in programming focusing on people on benefits. In 2013, the BBC broadcast We Pay Your Benefits, in which four taxpayers scrutinized the lifestyle and spending habits of four people on benefits to assess whether the financial support they received was too high. A spate of other programming then focused on the benefits system, including On Benefits and Proud (Channel 5, 2013) followed by a special focus on Roma in Gypsies on Benefits and Proud (Channel 5, 2014). Dubbed ‘poverty porn’ in media commentaries, the most popular of these shows was Benefits Street (Channel 4, 2014), which tapped into the explosion of public debate about the welfare state in the UK (Jensen 2014). The opening of each episode of Benefits Street followed a woman walking down a terraced street and pointing at each door, shouting ‘Unemployed! Unemployed!’, with heaps of rubbish on the street visible in the background. Watching the series was only a part of the experience. The associated sideshow of lavish media coverage, booming twitter feeds and the perception that everybody was watching and talking about the programme is a now recognizable factor in the highly constructed yet ‘authentic’ format of documentary-as-diversion (Corner 2002; Hill 2008).

In Benefits Street, while the focus was on the unemployed, there was a rapid demarcation of characters, as white and Black British-born residents were seen to be in opposition to migrants. In Episode Two, this became focused on Roma migrants in particular. This episode showed a number of residents calling out racist comments to a Romanian Roma family as they walked down the street. The residents accuse the family of splitting open the bin bags put out for collection in their search for scrap metal, leaving a mess of spilled rubbish across the street which the council refuses to pick up. But when we see the Romanian Roma family at work, they are picking up big pieces of scrap metal and hauling them onto a large truck. These do not look like people who would waste time splitting open and rummaging through bin bags. Despite learning about the family’s struggles—to get paperwork, their refusal to claim benefits (in direct contrast to the stated purpose of the series to look at people on benefits) and problems with their rented accommodation—it is the accusation of uncleanliness and parasitical behaviour which hangs in the air as the voice-over repeats that the family ‘live off other people’s rubbish’.

When the Romanian Roma family suddenly leaves, no one tells us why or where they have gone, leaving viewers with a sense of unease at the transience of migrant lives.

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