Who are transnational Roma “attached” to? Parental and children’s social bonds, and the implications for social work

In Italy, Roma children are not only considered as part of an ethnic group, but they are also a target group of public policies based on the idea that these are “unattached children” without any kind of national or transnational bonds, although they rarely live outside some kind of stable kinship/residential group. In order to make sense of this contradiction, we will use some ethnographic examples – resulting from a doctoral research on Roma childhood and parenthood in Italy carried out between 2009 and 2012 – to tackle parental modes of transmission and children’s experiences of transnational familyhood, in order to link these particular cases to a more complex theoretical framework that may help to conceptualize them. This article will argue that this contradiction rests upon a lack of recognition both of Roma culturally shaped modes of national and transnational “attachment” and of the role of Roma adults as actors of cultural transmissions. To do so, we will provide new interpretations in order to make sense of this minority group’s identity as a social, symbolic, and cultural construction and show some of the implications for social work and policy makers.