“Are they going to think I’m going to steal stuff from here?”
That’s the question Chantelle remembers asking herself after starting a new job and wondering whether or not to share her Romany heritage.
Chantelle, 23 from Bedfordshire, says she’s proud of her background but has sometimes been “nervous” to share it because of negative portrayals of her community in the media.
“When you watch films, it’s always like, ‘Oh, these are the Gypsies, they’re the bad guys,'” she explains.
Chantelle features in Stacey Dooley’s BBC documentary Growing Up Gypsy, which follows three young Romany women as they navigate everyday life.
The show comes as the charity Friends, Families and Travellers (FFT) – an organisation working to end discrimination against the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) community – says it regularly hears from Romany Gypsy women who feel pressure to hide their identity in professional or public spaces to avoid discrimination and hate.
Ebony, 23 from Nottinghamshire, works as a beautician and recalls a client at a previous job, who didn’t know about her heritage, telling her she didn’t want to park in a certain area because there were Gypsies living near there.
“And I was sat there, painting her nails, like: ‘Little do you know’,” she recalls thinking.
