Jarmila Balážová: Roma are abusing and threatening each other on Czech social media, where has our Paťiv gone?

As a journalist writing about a subject, people’s opinions about the subject itself are the only thing of interest to me. Naturally, I could have immediately paid the commentator back by posting that his profile photo “doesn’t correspond to the ideals of beauty or youth either, if he has to judge somebody.”

Why would I do that, though? Where have we come to that strangers – and what’s more, men – are daring to write such things to girls and women?

Why anybody should argue at all about something unrelated to the subject at hand is just coarse. Do some people really feel such a need to spit on others like this?

Do they feel the need to show their “strength” – even though it’s basically their weakness? I’m a grown woman, but what does this do to an 18-year-old girl?

“Who do you think you are!? You don’t have anything to teach anybody! What are you doing with all those tattoos up to your neck!? I’d like to know who chose these finalists. They all look older, no raving beauties,”an adult man roughly her father’s age (that is, according to his photo) has written to Sára, Romea’s 18-year-old TikToker.

Other comments posted there were meant to be even ruder to her: “I’ve never heard a better definition of a lesbian. May you could sign up your own wife.”

An adult guy is writing that to a young girl. I don’t get this crudity – no compassion, no gallantry, ignoring all the basic rules of interpersonal relations.

Another commenter, this time a woman, piled on with similar wording and even a threat to beat Sára up. When the ROMEA organization sent her a private message asking why she was attacking a girl who is young enough to be her own daughter in this way and asking how she would feel if her own daughter were to receive such a threat, she wrote back that she didn’t know why we were writing to her when others had also written disgusting comments about the TikToker – and then she blocked us.

The young TikToker became the victim of disgusting insults just because she expressed her opinion, through her video on social media, about other comments posted beneath an article by news server Romea.cz on the Czech-Slovak Miss Roma competition in Hodonín. Those comments beneath an ordinary news report about that annual contest were so disgusting, hateful and full of venom that they sparked a stormy discussion among Czech Romani Facebook users.

In response to those comments, which were made with absolutely no respect for the feelings of those girls or their relatives, some people wrote that the Roma need to rein this in, to stop criticizing those who are just trying to do something, and if they must criticize them, then they should do so within the norms of decent behavior. They pointed out – and it’s true that especially women pointed out – that each of those girls has parents and relatives, asking if the commentators realized how those people and the competing girls must feel when they read such filthy comments.

All Sára did was to point out in her video that this isn’t nice. She also pointed out how brave the girls were to sign up for the competition under such circumstances.

What’s more, any Romani person could have nominated his or her own daughter or niece or sister to compete. If they didn’t do so, then it’s irrelevant to write posts such as: “Yuck, not one of them holds a candle to my daughter”.

There’s nothing to be done about the fact that your daughter didn’t apply. Beauty contest organizers do not run around from town to town begging girls to enter.

You know, I am a journalist and my colleagues and I, for years now, have been encountering threats of a really crude nature, comments about us being “brown filth”, about our mothers being “whores” who gave birth to “swine”, telling us what they will do to us, that they’ll set us all on fire, burn down our office, etc. That has always been unpleasant, and I addressed such a matter with the police most recently one year ago, because the man concerned had acquired my private phone number, my address, followed my videos and repeatedly made disgusting threats to me by phone.

However, in such cases I can estimate how I should categorize the aggressor – a deranged individual, an extremist, a Nazi. In recent years, however, such “discord” is being disseminated among people to such a degree that it has become depressing, dismal.

Many people share this belief, which is why they are expressing their feelings publicly. They are pointing out that various competitions, platforms and podcasts representing the most debased behavior, the most debased moral values, are being given room today.

Instead of inviting on guests who aid others, who have mastered something, who perform lifesaving surgeries, who put out fires, who save lives, etc., we are allowing our culture of the public square, the culture of our speech, to be infested with the vocabulary of call girls and pimps. Some words which previously could never have been pronounced in public are becoming the acceptable norm today.

This means the social media vocabulary, these ways in which people are insulting each other, are also making it into the discussion spaces on regular media servers. Today, there is not a single media outlet that doesn’t have something similar posted to its online discussion spaces.

Female journalists are quite often becoming the victims of hate, as are politicians and publicly active persons – basically anybody today. Instead of criticism that is normal, people are attacked for their appearance, their orientation, their private lives.

This is dangerous and distasteful for the long-term perspective of the environment in which we live and in which future generations will live. The editors, both female and male, of all media outlets where individual journalists are identifiable and visible have their own knowledge of this.

Naturally, this is not just about journalists, but also about other public figures. However, Romani people here seemed for quite a long time to be sticking together on some things.

That has not been the case for quite some time now, though. The aggressivity of some Romani online discussers has grown to such a level that they are able to be tasteless about basically any subject.

These people are abusing and humiliating each other. They don’t care that these “arguments” are being reported on more and more often on the pages of Czech tabloids, which just harms all Romani people.

This is about the egos and interests of individuals versus the interest of the whole. Let’s get back, though, to the article I was telling you about.

Tell me, would you ever have anticipated so much disgust could be posted beneath a relatively positive report about the nth year of the annual Czech-Slovak Miss Roma competition, which Romani people themselves organize? For God’s sake, what is there to hate about it?

Why all this criticism that knows no limits, full of vulgarities? When somebody points out that this is happening, a ton of people immediately say they are offended, that there is freedom of speech here, right, so they have the right to express their opinion!

Sometimes I am still surprised that people whom I know personally are able to write such things, people whom I believe are intelligent, who treat their own children nicely, and then suddenly I read in the online public square, in relation to a different subject – and from a woman, moreover – that: “Today nobody can state their opinion and what they believe…immediately they are envied, hated, etc. …” People, get a grip: You can very well see that you are able to write whatever you want.

Basically, that’s even part of the problem. It’s simply incomprehensible how people are able to behave today, how far so many of them are willing to go.

The way each one of us writes online influences the public space. Everybody can read what you have written, everybody sees it.

Through our behavior, we are either allowing crudity to dominate in the future and the intensification of such interpersonal problems or, on the other hand, we could decide to cultivate our public behavior. That means not taking offense at the first opportunity.

Don’t behave like you’re on the “Clash” MMA show. Go ahead and ask questions, seek clarifications, write online, but do it in the way you would like people to speak or write about you and your loved ones.

Let’s not be jerks. After all, we don’t shout abuse in our own homes, or at our colleagues at work.

Explain to people that you are choosing a certain form of speech online so that you don’t harm others or insult them for no good reason. If I consistently harm somebody, insult them and lie about them, then how can I believe I will be forgiven, that the person will want to cooperate with me, or that I could lead some kind of process of unification, etc.?

On social media the complete opposite seems to apply today, though, everybody is tarring people with the same brush. There’s even a term for this now, you all have certainly noticed it.

If somebody dresses down somebody else online, they will be praised by others like this: “You slayed that!” („Zabils, to jsi zabila!“)

By reconciling ourselves to this type of communication, these insults, by supporting them, by not standing up to those making them, we are all “slaying” decent behavior and allowing it to harm the young at a time when even tougher adults are having a problem with this excess of aggression. Because of this, I regularly take a break from social media so I won’t become sickened by it.

It’s no secret that it is exactly social media which is behind the increasing percentage of youth with mental health problems. Yes, this subject is a big challenge for journalists and the media.

At a time when media content quite frequently reaches the public exactly through social networks, how can they supervise the level of the discussion there? Should they stop it, should they abolish it altogether?

They say that if media outlets do that, they will lose readership and therefore possible advertisers and subscribers, though. These aspects are interconnected, so the problem persists.

This is also a problem among the Roma themselves. They are then amazed that Roma who succeed, from the younger generation, don’t want to get involved in publicity and letting themselves be abused for no good reason.

Romani youth don’t want to waste their time constantly refuting these repeated stereotypes. Or dealing with these insults.

Those who are active and have been active for 20 or 30 years are having their breath taken away by these developments. They try to do something, and then somebody lies about them with impunity, insults them in a distasteful way that would simply have not been possible in Romani circles before.

Paťiv? Where is it?

In the public space at least, that concept is being lost. So, the next time you read that somebody “slayed” somebody else, please remember all of this.

This is about the space we all live in together. We must do unto other people as we would have them do unto us.

That goes for every single one of us. Thanks for reading to the end.