ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes a 2013 media panic in which Greek police accused a Roma couple of kidnapping their own adopted child because she was blond. Similar episodes occurred immediately afterward in Ireland. As the panic spread over the internet, it took on elements of the fantastic. I identify these stories as captivity narratives, a genre that typically foregrounds anxieties over race and power. I locate this recent moral panic in light of increasing racist attacks and expulsions facing the Roma and argue that it reveals broader anxieties surrounding changing forms of neoliberal circulation and instability in a changing Europe.
