ratcreature | this week's Criminal Minds

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this week's Criminal Minds

I'm really pissed off that the whole episode was built around the bizarre idea that Romani, in some kind of insulated subculture thing, were stealing children and murdering their parents, (not to mention live on petty crime, but that prejudice is fairly omnipresent).

IMO it made no dent at all in their racist message that, iirc, in two instances it was described as "perversion of Romani culture", considering that the end revealed that it wasn't just a single family passing on serial killer traditions, but a whole group of people and going on for a long time. Considering that the "gypsies will steal your children" is the kind of traditional prejudice that was used to justify systematic oppression and violence against Romani over centuries, I can't believe they went there. The mind boggles. I mean, in present day that is rather "out there" on the ridiculousness-scale of racist urban legends (I guess kind of like "Jews sacrifice babies"), and I don't think it's that present anymore in this extreme form (unlike the idea that all Romani were thieves and generally criminals, uneducated and superstitious, all those are alive and well, at least here), but still. WTF?

Seriously, Romani activists are still fighting against systematic (and sometimes even today still legislated) discrimination, there have been laws aimed at destroying their culture for a long time, not just during the holocaust when they were murdered (and afterwards the survivors weren't even acknowledged as victims for a long time, but still painted as criminals), but also all the laws aimed against itinerant lifestyles and so on. The assimilation politics aimed at destroying Roma culture continued after WWII and sometimes still do, and pretty much the only ones stealing children were authorities taking children from Roma families to force them into these assimilation schemes, like when they put Roma children into institutions and separated them from their families. Roma were also victims of forced sterilization programs in some countries, some of these have continued into the 1970s, iirc. And the racist prejudice against Romani are still bad and widespread. And from this episode it doesn't seem that Romani in the US are much better off in their public image than in Europe.

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SRSLY!??!

I haven't watched it yet, but man. That's disappointing. Especially as last week, I was really uncomfortable with the way that Rossi and Morgan were using homophobic baiting to try to trip up the baddie (who didn't seem too bothered by their articulating his desire for his partner in crime).

Seriously. I couldn't make up how horrible this was. It was way worse than the "usual" thing where Romani appear as thieves and such on tv. The family of course lived in a trailer, they trained their kid to pickpocket and lived on shoplifting and crime, once the boy turns ten they steal some girl for a forced Stockholm syndrome marriage, and the father who does this got his wife like that too and team discovers that this is a pattern all over the US with dozens and dozens of cases going back to the begin of their records, like 1900 or something, and they just didn't discover it earlier, because the crimes were too far apart. And the family had stranged superstitions too that helped the team to discover them. I was sitting their with my mouth dropped open, and didn't know what to say it was so bad.

tangentially--YES that was the thing that bugged me about the gay-baiting last episode. Not that they did it--in the interrogation room all kinds of nasty shit is fair--but that they kept obsessing over it when it obviously WASN'T working and WASN'T a weak spot. So then it started to feel like it was actually our guys obsessing over it, which I really do not like.

Oh man. Yes. I just watched these two back-to-back and it was totally “Wait… what?” Last week's was fail in a couple of ways, one of which for me was that they never seemed to twig that there was something fundamentally odd about a Black serial killer targeting white girls when they've always previously made a thing about the fact that the most common serial killer is an upper-middle class white guy, and if white girls are being killed, look for a white man, you know? And this time, they apparently picked this guy based on priors, and him being present at the scene of one of the previous crimes. But from a profiling POV, it looks like they were totally doing a REALLY BAD JOB if their profile pointed to him and the team aspect caught them by surprise.

I was just talking to someone about this example of the failboat last night. I think I'm especially disappointed because CM has done so well in so many other subject matters (the institutional prejudices against stalking cases, JJ's pregnancy, geekdom, feminism in general, some forms of mental illness, etc.) that to watch them fuck up something this horribly is sort of a double whammy.

Not that it mitigates at all, but I sort of thought the family at the end was maybe directly related to the unsub family - since there was mention of brothers, it seems that possibly the initial perversion in 1909 branched into a narrow family network...which made me wonder what they did with the girl babies because in 100 years, they had to have had a few. But again, that's a double fail because they've made the corrupted tradition of one (initial) person/family into a subsociety that's indistinguishable from the overarching group.

SIGH.

Yeah, sometimes CM does really well, but this one was just awful. And considering the number of dots on that map they must have had a lot of boy children they forced into marriage. I wondered about the girls too, maybe they used them for blood sacrifices or ate them, both of those explanations would fit with rest of the episode.

It was pretty horrifying. I mean honestly? I think Americans generally don't get that this is IN THE PRESENT. They have a couple romanticized ideas about ~The Romani~ and they've read a little urban fantasy and watched Snatch a couple times, but it's not a present and urgent cultural issue over here so unless people educate themselves they assume it's something that's either over or not a big deal. Which needless to say is not an excuse, just a reason. It was a pretty big shocker to me too when I realized they were playing it straight.

(Especially because if they'd dropped the sensationalist aspect they could have done a really interesting episode involving a "normal" (for them) crime taking place in a Romani group, and there would be cultural issues and difficulties due to transience and distrust, and they could get their "creepy superstitious killer perverting tradition" while actually HAVING OTHER ROMANI CHARACTERS and presenting it in the context of an actual culture. How awesome would that have been? SIGH.)

I guess there aren't many Romani in the US then? I mean, I remember hearing about a law passed in the 19th century that forbade their immigration to the US. They still seem to be regularly suspected of crime in the US just as they are here though:
http://www.nabihq.org/en-us/News/la_times_2006-01-30.php?sf_jst=r

well i gather that--in the british isles at least, which is where i have absorbed a little cultural information--the stereotype of 'travelers' and them being thieves and so forth is quite current and more or less common knowledge? whereas again to use Snatch as an example, U.S. audiences (myself mostly included) had no IDEA what the whole 'travelers'/RV/weird dialect thing was about. It's just not something people think about at all. Possibly because the US is so huge geographically that there's much more of a cultural divide between urban/suburban and rural areas? POSSIBLY I AM WRONG. But I definitely had the impression that most americans have no clue that "gypsies" are an actual, currently alive and persecuted culture.

I think the UK travelers are a different people (though probably facing similar problems).

But yeah, I guess it is more visible here, since regularly the problems land in front of the EU human rights commissions and such. And there are Romani activists too. Not that many care, I think the issue doesn't get much public support, whereas the opinion that it was somehow justified to harass and ostracize Romani because they are seen as some sort of "social blight" is still fairly widespread. It's not just individual hate crimes and police brutality, and prejudice (like people don't want Romani as neighbors and even admit to that when asked) but also governments. Like last year in Italy when they wanted to fingerprint all Romani as some kind of anti-crime measure. And I think Slovakia and the Czech Republic were censured by the EU for segregating Romani children into special schools. There even have been a few cases of forced sterilization in some EU countries in the 2000s still. Which is mindboggling.

UK Travellers (in general) are thought to be descended from Irish farmers forced off their land during Cromwell's invasion of Ireland and/or the potato famine of the 1840's. They are separate, both culturally and ethnically, from the Romany.

I don't know of any anti-Romany laws being passed in the US. There is some perception of them being "exotic" and mysterious, free spirits with beautiful women and dashing men. In general, I think that they'd be more looked down on for being poor (if they were) than being Romany. The same goes for the Travellers, though there was a TV series called "The Riches" which featured a family of Traveller con artists.

Well, googling anti-Roma law in conjunciton with the United States informs me that in 1998 in New Jersey the last anti-Roma law in the US was officially rescinded by their govenor, so while that is not a 100% reliable fact check I suspect that kind of law must have existed in other US states too, and had effects at some point. And these "positive" stereotypes exist here too, but of course there is no contradiction between that and the negative ones, these things usually co-exist and even reinforce each other. I mean, it's like the idea that black people somehow were more "musical" than whites and such.

The NJ law was the only one I was able to find, so if you found any others, could you please tell me what states they were for? Also if there are any enforcement data as to whether or not the laws were ever used against Romany. I mean, Mississippi only officially repealed slavery in 1995, so just because it's on the books doesn't necessarily mean anything.

I don't really have the knowlege or resources to research this. My point was more that at the point when there are calls for laws against certain groups (whether they are then strictly enforced or not), the prejudice and discrimination is there in the society calling for those laws to "protect" them from that group. I mean, for example whether or not they are enforced anti-sodomy laws say something about the underlying attitudes.

The underlying attitudes of WASP male middle- and upper-class legislators in 1917. Hence the questions as to whether or not the community in general supported the law by trying to enforce it, especially since the law didn't actually regulate Romany; it permitted communities within the state to pass laws regulating them. None of the articles I read then gave any examples of discriminatory regulations passed as a result.

And that NJ law isn't on the books anymore. It was repealed over 11 years ago when a bunch of non-Romany community members and legislators got pissed off at its discriminatory nature. According to the Patrin law journal (http://www.geocities.com/~Patrin/rights.htm) (who should know), it was the last anti-Romany state law remaining in the US.

Especially because if they'd dropped the sensationalist aspect they could have done a really interesting episode involving a "normal" (for them) crime taking place in a Romani group, and there would be cultural issues and difficulties due to transience and distrust, and they could get their "creepy superstitious killer perverting tradition" while actually HAVING OTHER ROMANI CHARACTERS and presenting it in the context of an actual culture. How awesome would that have been?

THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN SUPER AWESOME. I will pretend this is the episode that actually happened.

Thank you for posting this. This bothered me as well, but you enunciated it so much more clearly than I could have. I normally trust Criminal Minds not to mess stuff up on quite this scale. It was sort of a "they did not really -- oh god, they did. D:" moment for me all episode.

Yeah. I sat in speechless horror the whole episode (well actually at first I hoped this would turn around somehow still, but it just got worse and worse), and just couldn't believe it.

Yes, that bothered me, too. :-/

This ep was definitely one of the low points of the series.

That really annoyed me too - I spent a lot of time after the "oh hey, they're Romani" reveal waiting for them to tell us more about what the culture is really like, and they never did. They just told us what the family is like, and sort of vaguely implied a few times that not all Romani are exactly like this, but they didn't give us anything to compare it to. And it's such a neglected issue that I wanted to hear more.

I would have loved if, rather than it just being the "Reid and Prentiss know everything" show - which is awesome, on occasion - they had to consult with someone who was Romani who could have looked at the unsub family and gone, "Wow, these people are crazy and have no idea what the hell they're doing, because that's not what we do at all, this is what we really do." And then I realized what I really wanted was some sort of Romani version of John Blackwolf. Because really - they do such a good job dealing with Native American culture, and then they just really fell down on the job here. Extremely disappointing, especially as it was a great episode in other ways.

I have to admit that not much of the rest of the ep, like team interaction and personal stuff, even registered for me, because the cliches just kept getting worse and worse, and I just couldn't believe that they really went there, and then even made it a long-term enduring pattern with many abductions over a century.

It didn't even make any sense on a pure plot level. I mean, they never explained how this crazy subgroup managed to keep separate and secret from their own people and other relatives too over the long term (at some point, unless they were really trying to say Romani were okay with child stealing, the one who started this must have had sane relatives and a community after all), even if they managed to completely stay under the radar of the authorities despite a lifestyle based on criminal activities (which I find hard to believe in itself over such a long time with a large group). And what are they doing with their own girls? Nothing of this made sense if you looked a little deeper. So I found it stretched my suspension of disbelief a lot even disregarding the racist cliches.

I was really unhappy about it when they went there, although in the moment I allowed myself to be more comforted by the "perverted the culture" comments by deciding that they weren't Romani at all, but... that was totally in my head, and even if it weren't, it's a red herring, because as you say, the association is still going to be there.

I wonder if they could have done it without involving the mention of Romani at all, just a creepy family tradition that somehow got started by some sociopath who raised his family up in it. Probably not; the way of life would still be reminiscent of Romani. Although maybe they could have had someone bring the similarity up and have shot it down completely.

Sigh.

To me it felt like a lipservice, that didn't make much difference at all. Twice or so someone says "Romani culture isn't like that, this is a perversion of it" (and now that I think of it this still kind of implies that this is somehow descended from it, rather than just a Romani being a serial killer), but the whole episode they *show* us something else, and then aren't even content to let it be a single event, but make it a group thing.

Yeah, I kind of wanted to read it like that as well, but then there were the language issues.

but really, the fact that they took a prejudice like "stealing your children" and ran with it seemed much worse than just any ole crime...

Oh, good grief, the language. I'm just dumb; that definitely supports

ratcreature's realization that even what they did say still implies it descended from Romani culture. So I completely abdicate any claim that they were even giving lip service to it not being connected to Romani. Utter Fail.

I wonder if they could have done it without involving the mention of Romani at all, just a creepy family tradition that somehow got started by some sociopath who raised his family up in it. Probably not; the way of life would still be reminiscent of Romani. Although maybe they could have had someone bring the similarity up and have shot it down completely.

That was my thought as well. Why go the Romani-direction and not just go with a family of drifters that have developed into this? It could work. It would have worked much better than this storyline did, if you ask me.

I know I read a crime-novel last year that dealt with a similar topic (a family traveling all over the US, kidnapping couples, killing the husband, waiting for the woman to give birth, killing the mother and then selling the baby. That family had also been doing this for decades and the new killers were actually the children of the original couple.) I can't remember which writer it was. I thought it was Kathy Reichs because I vividly remember a scene where the heroine is digging and finding skeletons but... hah, it's Tess Gerritsen.

Anyway, CM might have gone that way and pulled it off without hitting the Romani-angle and all the racial issues and the prejudices inherent in it. That was one of the worst episodes in ever.

I think maybe it could work? But I wonder if the constellation of stereotypical elements (stealing children/living in RVs/shop-lifting/superstitions) might not have still made the association. And the use of the Romani language, which I completely blanked out at first; I suppose they could have had her whisper so that we heard, and the team didn't, but... It's just kind of iffy.

But it definitely could have been better done. Maybe. *g*

It's the equivalent of having an episode in which a group of Jewish bakers are shown coming their hair over their horns before robbing cradles to get fresh baby blood for their bread. It's not only racist, but it's ancient mythological racism which anyone with access to google and a lick of sense would recognize as such.

Yeah. It was pretty far out there. I mean, sad as that is, I usually don't even take much notice of stereotypes about Romani, because they are so omnipresent and they almost never appear in either fiction or news as anything *but* thieves and such, or as some sort of "social blight" that needs fixing. (Or sometimes as some kind of folk art cliche, I guess.) But this was so extreme I couldn't believe the series went there.

Also this has extra horrible irony in that in reality the children being stolen from their families all too often were (and still are) Romani children by various authorities.

I've read the book that Criminal Minds is influenced by, which is 'Mind Hunter : Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit' by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, well worth a read. I think Mandy Patinkin's character was based on him, and some of the cases as well. I haven't watched every single episode, it's not the show I follow closely, but every single episode I've seen (so far) has been based on a real case, very loosely, but you can pretty much work out who it's about.

So, would this be based on a real life case? Really really badly adapted, although I can't think of any off-hand? Not that it makes it any better....

I have no clue about this book, because I generally don't read serial killer stuff, I only watch procedurals sometimes. But I honestly can't imagine this kind of plot would have worked in the real world, especially not the multigenerational clan thing that posited this going on for a century.

Well, there are a lot of very, very bizarre cases out there, but yeah, I read a lot of forensic serial novels for fun (and then I can't sleep) and I've never come across this type of thing.

However, a real life case involving travellers, I came across was in a forensic mental hospital in North England, was where a young teenage traveller was beaten to death because he was a traveller. It was appalling, I had to transcribe the case.

Prejudice against Irish travellers in England is very open, at least in the work places I was in at while living there. I think it's probably important for me to point out, that although Irish travellers face the same discrimination and have the same type of sterotypes that the travellers do in Europe, they aren't related ethnically.

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