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Integration or marginalization? The failures of social policy for the Roma in Rome

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Isabella Clough Marinaro
Isabella Clough Marinaro*
Affiliation:
Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY. E-mail: [email protected]
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Summary

This article examines Rome City Council's policies concerning the Roma during Francesco Rutelli's two terms as mayor (1993-2001). It demonstrates that the Rutelli administration's policies for these minority communities shifted from a superficial but genuine attempt to overcome aspects of marginalization to a criminalizing strategy of exclusion. It is argued here that the failure significantly to improve the social conditions of the Roma was due to (a) a refusal to tackle the inter-related causes of their social exclusion and (b) submission to the anti-Roma hostility of parts of the voting public. Following the demolition of Rome's largest shanty town in October 2000, the Council was unable to house many of the Roma it had made homeless. It would seem that a ‘cleaning-up’ campaign was intro duced to distance undocumented individuals and those with criminal records from the city through a notable rise in police raids. This change in approach was accompanied and justified by an intensification of ethnicized public order discourse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , November 2003 , pp. 203 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

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References

Notes

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