Transcripts

Davie Donaldson

So, my name’s David Donaldson, I’m a Scottish Traveller rights campaigner, and broadly, social justice campaigner as well and a lot of my experience has been in highlighting the culture of gypsy traveller communities in Scotland, highlighting inequalities that we continue to face and more than anything, empowering voices from within the community to take charge and leadership on tackling those inequalities.

Intersectionality is one of those things that as soon as you learn about it, I feel like it opens your eyes to so much that goes on in society, and it shows you so many hidden layers of not only social structure but inequality as well that you might not have otherwise seen prior to learning about the topic, intersectionality. I think when we put that lens on the gypsy traveller communities in Scotland, we start to recognise that whilst there’s been a lot of resources created, particularly around the cultures of gypsy traveller communities and engaging with gypsy traveller communities, they’ve overlooked intersectionality in a lot of times particularly when we talk about LGBT identity and gender.

I felt that this resource, really taking that lens and looking at both of those topics would be filling a gap in the resources that currently exist but more than anything, really opening people’s eyes to how the experience of being a gypsy traveller can be vastly and really distinctly different depending on your intersecting identities. So, if, for example, you’re a young gypsy traveller man who also happens to be gay, you’re going to experience your identity and thus the inequalities of your identity as well in a totally different way and I feel that social workers particularly, and social work professionals, have to have the recognition of intersectionality and have to have a recognition of how that can, both mitigate some inequalities in some cases but actually enhance and compound others in other ways, so that they can effectively engage with the community and meaningfully move to a solution focused approach.

So, I think that really was one of the key reasons that we chose to focus on intersectionality but more than anything as well, through this resource we were able to empower voices from within gypsy traveller communities who are seldom empowered. I mean when we talk about LGBT community, for instance, when we talk about Scotland and gypsy traveller communities, there is no organisation in Scotland that focuses on solely supporting gypsy travellers who happen to be in the LGBT community, you know, and we don’t have any really public facing LGBT champions in Scotland from the community and so often times, their voice, even within gypsy traveller meetings, within gypsy traveller movements, it is marginalised, they are the marginalised within the marginalised. So, we were able to empower young people, you know, who are LGBT but also gypsy travellers to talk about both parts of their identities, something which they don’t usually get to do because for so many times, particularly when we talk about policy and engagement, we tend to treat each identify in silo and what this resource does really effectively is to try and break that sort of traditional mentality of treating identities in silo and say, well actually someone is, one person is so many things.

They may be a gypsy traveller but they’re also a mother or they’re also a woman and then of course they then experience obviously the inequalities that exist with each of these compounding identities so, I think that resource did this well but more than anything as well, when we talk about gender, gender within our community is something which has been strongly stereotyped and strongly, you know there’s a lot of trokes surrounding particularly gender in the media when we talk about gypsy traveller communities, so what this resource was able to do was actually to give the mike to women in our community and say, what do you think?

Particularly in the media and these types of things, and through that experience it was both empowering but actually meaningful to have that insight for professionals as well. I mean, they cut across so many different issues and themes as well or subjects I suppose would probably be a better word that social work may support with and deal with on a daily basis in some cases but it’s having all of that in one place but having it in one place where it’s totally from the narrative and from the voice of someone within the community from that lived experience and I think that to me was the most important element was to actually have lived experience coming through and say, okay look well here’s how it is on paper but in my experience this is how it actually happened and we have conflictions so, in one case for example we have a young woman in the resource who had experienced a really positive experience with social work and she’d spoke really proudly of how the social worker had taken the time to learn more about her culture and I think she puts it as running things past the family and really making sure that both her and her family were informed, that they were totally co-producing at any type of solution that came out of that relationship and that was a really positive example and on the other side of the coin we had another young woman in there who had a very different experience with social work particularly in reference to risk assessments and how those risk assessments, she felt curtailed and constricted her ability to live a traditional traveller way of life.

The resource offers both looks at things, it’s not just all bad, bad, bad but it’s actually a real reflective picture of how things are on the ground and it offers really good practice and I think what’s nice is that that good practice came through in the resource as well and that we do have examples of social workers really taking that extra step and really working with families, and to me that’s something that not only helped to support positive practice coming through the resource but it actually helps to break some stereotypes that exist about social work, particularly within gypsy traveller communities.

When I was growing up, and this comes through very, very strongly as well in all of the case studies or the voices within the resource, when I was growing up social work was a taboo word, the cruelty is what we called them and they weren’t to be trusted, if someone was involved with social work, was how it was put, that was a really negative thing. And there was a lot of fear, a massive amount of fear of social work and of course a lot of that was grounded in historical relationship between social workers and authority, more broadly, and gypsy traveller communities and so our resource was able to link both the everyday contemporary livid experience through that, our voices section, with that historical information as well particularly around forced migration, you know the removal of children, these types of things that continue to compound and lay a foundation for mistrust within the gypsy traveller community.

We were able to challenge stereotypes within the gypsy traveller community about social work and I hope to challenge stereotypes about gypsy traveller communities within social work practice. You know that was the idea, it was for this resource, principally to work for professionals but also for the community to feel reflected and meaningfully represented within this resource as well and I think we’ve done that. It was deeply, deeply reflective, when I first started, to be honest I didn’t expect to learn anything that I didn’t already know, if I’m honest. I thought maybe from some of the young people, I’d be speaking to, I’d learn stuff about their personal experience that maybe I didn’t know before or some elements of social work practice that I didn’t know, may be didn’t work or worked well but to be honest, I learned so much about my own community and the privilege I had as a young man within the community, a young straight man in the community that I suppose I never fully recognised that I had, and for me just handing the mike over, because in every interview situation of course there were prompting questions to ask people about their experiences and these types of things but it was totally up to the contributor and where they took their own lived experience, they could talk about anything they wanted, effectively, and that’s why if you read the our voices section, some of them are totally different, they go in totally different ways and you really get the person’s own journey reflected through that story.

Actually physically handing the mic over in a situation where I’m used to having the mic was really meaningful because it actually helped me to step back and reflect and recognise, wow, I didn’t realise these inequalities or these social constraints or that tradition could be perceived in this way within my own community and there was many a time where I sat back and I was like, oh I can actually remember that happening or there are certain traditions in our community that I suppose, I never really took any notice of because they didn’t impact on me, I mean this is it, a lot of things didn’t impact on me and particularly when we talk about the young women who were involved in the project, they spoke really strongly about gender roles within the community and how they felt at times that they were constricted by gender roles, that tradition … you know, that they were expected to be seen a certain way and that put a lot of pressure on them as young women growing up and I’d never really seen that.

I’ve got 3 sisters, all younger than me but I’m sitting back and listening to them say particular things, it really helped me to reflect and to recognise that there are issues within the community as well as outside the community and that caused me a kind of an internal conflict or struggle, I don’t really know what the best word would be but I’m so used to being an activist for the community and speaking out against inequalities placed on us and most of the time it’s authority is not bad but authority is X, Y and Z and this is causing these inequalities or this organisation needs to change because it’s doing X, Y and Z and it actually allowed me to put my own eye back onto my own community and say, well actually in our community as well, like any community, there are social inequalities that exist. Right, misogyny exists the same way it does in the settled community, you know when we were talking to the young LGBT people in the project, they spoke really strongly about toxic masculinity and how growing up for them, they felt they … one person in particular.

James, he spoke strongly about feeling like he didn’t really fit in with the men growing up and he would always prefer to stay with the women at camp and not go and do what was traditionally kind of the masculine things in the community because he just wasn’t interested and how he was then treated as a young gay man growing up in the community and it was all these things I’d never seen before and it sounds almost naive because of course I saw them in the settled community right and you know, I’ve been a strong ally with LGBT communities and most of my close friends are LGBT, if I’m honest, whilst I knew those things existed in society at large, I’d never really thought about them within my own community.

There was actually a point where I sat back and I thought, you know, could this resource be potentially explosive in a way. Could the … particularly some of the quotes, I mean obviously the full transcripts of every conversation that I had are in the resource, I didn’t cut anything out and so I thought, some of these things are really … they risk portraying travellers as all these horrific things and almost, in my head, it was compounding inequalities and compounding the tropes that exist about travellers. And I sat back and actually I spoke to all the contributors again, I had a conversation with them all and I was like, well what do you think?

You know, I’ve reflected and I realised that all these things exist and I’ve never really thought about it before and what if people think that all travellers are bad people and we’re all misogynist and homophobic and all these horrific things. It actually gave me a really good reality check because each of the contributors, obviously on their own, but each of them turned round to me and said, yeah but that exists in the settled community too, no one will think that we’re all misogynists. I mean the bottom line is I’m also a traveller, I’m writing about this, they’re travellers, they’re talking about their experience of being LGBT and still being proud of being a traveller. James, for example, talks about still being a proud catholic as well and it actually gave me a reality check that the only way it would be bad is if you didn’t include this stuff. If you deliberately hid this, then you’re actually aiding misogyny, you’re aiding toxic masculinity, and the only way it can actually be helped is by calling it out but it doesn’t mean the whole community thinks that way and that was a totally new lens for me.

I have to admit it was a totally, totally new lens because up until then, I suppose, in my own head it was you know, if you critique the community, we get so much criticism from everyone else already that you’re almost just adding to the issue but actually you’re part of the solution by doing that so, I feel that this resource is really new in its approach because it’s written by the community, you know I’m from the community myself, all of the voices within it are from the community and we’re actually taking the leadership in tackling the social issues that exist both against that community but also within our community as well.

It’s been massively reflective, massively positive, the experience for me has been, yeah, deeply, deeply meaningful. (… unclear), certainly my ambition for it is on one level it’s to build a cultural awareness about the community, I mean, we had a realisation that at large within the kind of professional sector and despite a lot of the fantastic work done by Iriss and others to create resources that really bring about cultural awareness, there was a lack of kind of consolidated resource or a consolidated place where we could find information to become culturally aware of gypsy travellers, the recognition that the gypsy traveller community isn’t one community, we’re actually a diverse number of communities. A place where each of those voices was represented but also a place that could be ever evolving and really recognisant of the fact that there’s always going to be changes to our understanding of communities. Communities themselves, obviously, change over time and the way they interact with society and interact within society will change over time.

So, we needed a place that could be ever evolving but also consolidated so, I’m hopeful that this resource on one level will be that place, it will be a place where people can check into on a regular basis even and link in with cultural awareness, there’s a number of links for example to other organisations, to fantastic sites like Travellers Times and others where you can learn interactively as well about these communities in different formats, whether that be reading or watching videos or I think it lends itself to really learning more about the communities through the communities lens. So, on one level I hope it does that but on another, I hope it fills a clear gap in the voices that are recognised and given a platform within Scotland, you know this resource gives its whole platform really to young people, principally young people, young women and young LGBT people from within gypsy traveller communities.

You know and that is from within the communities, at large, a number of those voices are Scottish travellers but we do have Irish travellers in there as well. So, I’m hopeful that this will start a new recognisance within professionals that just speaking to one person, or hearing one person’s voice, doesn’t represent or reflect the experience of the whole community and I feel for so long that’s been the easy approach, and that’s been the approach taken by a number of organisations, by government, by local authorities and I’m hopeful that this resource will show that just because someone’s a gypsy traveller, doesn’t mean they have the same experience as another gypsy traveller, right, and there are these intersecting identities that need to be thought through and they need to be thought about in terms of policy, in terms of practice. So, I’m hopeful that it will do that and it will start and catalyse that conversation at a professional level and even a national level, to be honest. And the last thing that I’m hoping it will do is for professionals, I hope it really lays out some really practical steps they can take to improve their own personal practice, you know, particularly on engagement, there’s a really good tool in there, mang, which is really simple, we’ve tried to keep everything simple in there but a tool that can deal with, at times, quite complex issues, you know when we’re talking about things like unconscious bias for example, it can be really easy to lose ourselves in the theory of things but what I’m hopeful this resource will do is take the theory such as cultural trauma, intersectionality, unconscious bias and put it into a really practical way that people can take steps, starting now, really, within their own practice and over time that can become institutionalised to make sure that practice is equitable but also that it’s human rights focused as well.

We’re at a really good time right now in Scotland particularly with the recent human rights bill being launched alongside conversations like this happening. I mean even just us speaking here today and this resource being created, I mean, you go back a couple of decades, that conversation would never have been given a platform to even happen.

LGBT, identities within our community or even gender within our community because whilst the majority of the activists that I stand on the shoulders of, were women, you know it has to be said, women within our community have always been very, very strong advocates for our community and the resource pays homage to that but there was still not a platform given for these really critical conversations that need to happen, you know there wasn’t a platform given to the voices that distended from the fact that travellers are all just you know this musical people that are magical and we do all these things that might sound amazing in a fairy-tale and some of it may be beautiful and you know some of it may be based on cultural truth however there are still these other issues that exist within our communities that need to have a critical conversation and we need to empower people within the community to do that so, I’m hopeful the resource has done that and that social workers can take the practical steps that the resource lays out to continue those conversations on a local level with the communities that they support.