David Scheffel

David Z. Scheffel was professor of anthropology at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.^[1] Born in former Czechoslovakia in 1955, he emigrated in August 1968 after the Soviet invasion with his parents and sister to Austria. Scheffel earned degrees in Canada in anthropology, culminating in his doctorate from McMaster University in 1988. His main areas of interest in the last couple of decades is ethnology studies of the Romani people in Europe. Scheffel is the author of numerous scholarly articles and books, including (Broadview Press, 1991), a work on the Russian Orthodox breakaway Old Believers sect in Alberta.

Scheffel's efforts to help impoverished Roma rebuild their community in the Slovakian village of Svinia is the subject of a 1998 documentary film, The Gypsies of Svinia.^[2] He is also the author of the 2005 study Svinia in Black and White: Slovak Roma and their Neighbours (University of Toronto Press).

Sexual abuse and sentence

In June 2019, a Slovakian court in Prešov found David Scheffel guilty of sexual abuse and illegal weapon possession and sentenced him to seven years in prison.^[3] The verdict is under appeal. However, the appeal court in Prešov confirmed in 2020 his guilty and sentenced him to prison of seven years for sexual abuse of female children of Roma origin. The case of David Scheffel could be considered as the flagrant abuse of the academic position of a "powerful white man" over a marginalized and underdeveloped "non- white population".https://dennikn.sk/minuta/2035107/ The sentence of the court of the Slovac republic which is a part of the progressive core of the European Union (the feminist female president Zuzana Čaputová is a head of state) should be used as an example of a fight against structural racism inherent in Western society. The case of David Scheffel and his sexual exploitation of Roma females and children should be studied and discussed in the academic and public sphere to avoid such cases of phallocentric dominance in the future.

Books[]

• Svinia in Black and White: Slovak Roma and their Neighbours - revised edition (University of Toronto Press, 2009).
• Roma Marginality/Romska Marginalita (Proceedings from conference “Assessment of marginality and integration among disadvantaged groups”), (editor). (Prešov, Slovakia 2004).
• In the Shadow of Antichrist: The Old Believers of Alberta. (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1991).

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