Who is Maria?

When a friend of mine was pregnant, she told her husband she had a notion to call the baby Kiri. He was very calm about this: Okay , he said, if this wee Glesga wean is born with Maori DNA, we'll call her Kiri. Otherwise...

The chances of that happening were remote, but I suspect the case of Maria, the wee blond girl adopted/abducted by Roma in Greece is much more complicated. Maria doesn't share DNA with the family she lived with. We're all so agitated in western Europe about the reopening of the investigation into Madeline McCann's disappearance, it's as if we want to believe that Maria is a 'trafficked' child. But the fact is she could easily be Roma in origin, since there are plenty of fair-haired and fair-skinned Roma in eastern Europe. You only had to watch Rageh Omar's series on the Ottoman Empire on BBC4 to see how the populations from central Asia to the Balkans and the shores of north Africa were mixed together for 600 years.

But what makes Maria's case really complicated is our reaction - those of us in the west and east of Europe who are not Roma - to how the Roma live. We don't like them - and I include myself in that description, having been attacked by a gang of teenage Roma girls in the street in Rome in broad daylight. I imagine the former colleague who got her bag snatched in a street in Barcelona by a Roma couple felt the same. And the other colleague pick-pocketed on the Paris Metro who pointed out who had done it to a cop but couldn't get him to take her seriously: Ça arrive, Madame, he said and went on to advise her to take better care of her belongings.

It's easy to work out where all this started. Much harder to work out what to do about it. The Roma were nomads whose lifestyle was totally different from that of the farmers around them. Centuries of social exclusion left the Roma outside our society and feeling they were battling to survive. They've had to suffer being shunted around Europe and central Asia and are still discriminated against in housing and jobs in eastern Europe. In World War 2, they were shoved into Nazi concentration camps and murdered as brutally as Jews, gays and the disabled. It's hard to believe that a whole race of people could be criminals born and bred but it is quite possible to look around and see other groups we used to look on in that way. It's not that long ago that landlords put signs outside their lodgings that read: No dogs, no Irish, no Coloureds.

The Roma respond to discrimination on our part by claiming always to be put upon, treated unjustly, made scapegoats of. and they'll go on doing that so long as we go on treating them as some kind of underclass.

So here's a thought: what if Maria was abandoned by her mother and this family took her in, fed and clothed her and used her as a street beggar in return. Is that not better than her being dumped in some hell-hole of an 'orphanage' - which is where she is now, I have to point out. Can any of us in the west do anything to help children like Maria? It's hard to know what we could do but if we don't try the racism - because that's what this kind of discrimination amounts to - will go on. If we need an incentive, maybe we should remember: people denied admission to our community have no reason to protect it and plenty of reason to undermine it.