CHILDREN as young as four play unsupervised on busy street corners by day, while teenagers hurl bricks and bottles at each other by night.
Welcome to Govanhill in Glasgow, where young families who came in search of a better life find themselves caught up in rising racial tensions.
Residents claim toddlers and youngsters, originally from Slovakia or the Czech Republic, are allowed to roam the streets unchecked for hours on end.
That, and other cultural differences, is adding strain to a complex situation leaving the community divided.
advertisementPoliticians and anti-racism campaigners are urging calm and tolerance, as well as calling for money to be spent on schemes to help integrate Eastern European families.
Tensions are so bad violence has flared on several occasions between groups of Eastern European teenagers and white Scots or Scottish Asians.
This week there was a running battle when up to 20 teenagers threw bottles and bricks at each other for almost an hour in Dixon Avenue.
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1 response so far ↓
1 Hynek // May 22, 2007 at 9:51 pm
I’m living in the Czech Republic – and I can assure you, we are normal Europeans like you. The families described in this article are not czech, they are romany(gipsy). We have had similar problems with them here, including not sending their children to school, not working, fighting, etc. for decades now. These people are UNABLE to get integrated, but I’m very unhappy that it looks as if these families were Czech or Slovak.
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