![]() It is rare for women to call the police for help. "With my brother close by, he wouldn't dare come here." She now feels safe because she has male family members living on the same site. "I left him and went back to my mammy but he kept finding me, taking me home and getting me pregnant," Kathleen says. ![]() And a significant number of those women who had reported the abuse appeared to have suffered more severe and sustained violence than those within mainstream communities. ![]() Although there is no conclusive evidence about the prevalence of this abuse, a study in Wrexham, cited in a paper by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2007, found that 61% of married English Gypsy women and 81% of Irish Travellers had experienced domestic abuse. Along with many other Gypsy and Traveller women in the UK, Kathleen was a victim of domestic violence. Kathleen, who lives with her six children in a three-bedroom trailer, is fairly typical of an Irish Traveller woman, except that she is separated from her husband. Last week C4 was accused by the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain of fuelling "hatred and suspicion" of their way of life and have demanded a right of reply. Since 2002, Travellers have been recognised as an ethnic group and are protected under the Race Relations Act. There are around 300,000 Gypsy Roma and Irish Travellers in the UK – Roma Gypsies are originally from northern India, whereas Travellers are of Irish origin – and both groups are nomadic. MBFGW was about Gypsies and Travellers, but there was criticism from both communities that C4 failed to properly distinguish between the two. But the show largely avoided the myriad of problems, such as discrimination, poor health and poverty faced by Travellers, except for what felt like a tokenistic final episode, and instead focused on over-the-top wedding dresses and other excesses. M y Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, the television series that ended last week and attracted nine million viewers, was designed to "throw an overdue light on a secretive, marginalised and little-understood segment of our society", according to the blurb from Channel 4.
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