Samenvatting

Legal institutions as well as European and international organisations have criticised Dutch policy regarding travellers (including Roma and Sinti living in a caravan). Main point of this criticism is that the Dutch government should do more to protect and facilitate the travellers culture.
In academic literature, the policy has also been criticised from a human rights perspective. In most of these official and academic publications the perspective of travellers was missing. This gave reason for a qualitative research in the form of ten interviews with travellers in the Netherlands. Questions as what does it mean to be a traveller, how should your culture be protected and what do you do to protect your culture (using the law for instance) were, among others, part of these interviews.
This article not only discusses the results of the interviews, but places them also against the theoretical background of legal consciousness, in particular the research of Ewick and Silbey (1998) in which three categories of attitudes towards the law and legal institutions were distinguished.
At forehand it was expected that, as being a minority group, travellers would fall in the category ‘against the law’. Yet the findings of this research suggest that travellers, at least the respondents, fall in the category ‘with the law’. They use the law to reach a better position, i.e. to protect their cultural identity.