She is, we have been told repeatedly, the girl Greece is calling "the blonde angel". She is certainly blonde – and she is a young child who deserves concern as all children do, particularly those facing poverty or discrimination. Whether or not she is angelic is a matter of stereotype rather than personality. She is angelic in the eyes of the media only in stark contrast to the circumstances in which she was found: in a Roma camp in Greece, with dark-skinned parents who, DNA tests have revealed, cannot be her birth parents. The pair appeared in court on Monday charged with child abduction, but are said by their lawyer to be distraught at the forcible removal of a child they were raising as their daughter.

Whatever the truth of Maria's origins, one element of this case is not in doubt. Even before charges were brought, it was widely reported as a case of abduction. The pursuit of Gerry and Kate McCann and the mother of Ben Needham for reaction will have cemented that impression in the eyes of many; they have been "given hope", apparently. Maria's case may even, it seems, have prompted the seizure by police in Dublin today of another child from a Roma community after members of the public raised concerns that the child may not be biologically related to the couple she was living with.

Informal adoption is commonplace, particularly in societies where children are raised collectively by extended family units, and families of eight or 10 are not unusual. Across the world, children in economically difficult circumstances are left with grandparents, aunts and uncles, or sometimes given away because the birth parents cannot provide for them. This is hardly a practice unique to Roma society, and it is a long way from deliberate abduction for the purposes of "child trafficking", an assumption that the non-Roma world has been happy to make with impunity.

This media reporting has to be seen within the context of a blood libel that has dogged Roma communities for centuries. The claim that Jewish people killed Christian children to have human blood for matzos at Passover was used to justify antisemitism throughout the middle ages; in the same way, the age-old myth that Romanies are in the habit of kidnapping white children entered popular folklore around the same time, and has persisted to the present day.

Fictional stereotypes of Romany women revolve around their supposed sexual licentiousness – Carmen or Esmeralda – or their psychic powers; whereas Romany men have been portrayed at best as symbols of wild freedom, as in DH Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gypsy or at worst, as liars and thieves. The passionate love for children patently demonstrated in Roma communities of all types rarely seem to get a mention, strangely enough. But as the Slovakian Roma writer Ilona Lackova said in her autobiography, A False Dawn, "we cannot understand how you would not give a child a smile even if it is not yours". If a youngster falls over and hurts him or herself in a Roma camp, it's the business of any adult or older child nearby to provide comfort. The head of the Greek charity that has custody of Maria reported that she was "dirty" and "terrified": that she may have been dirty because of the appalling conditions in which many Roma are forced to live by poverty and terrified at being removed from her family was not noted.

The racist reporting of the Greek case is all the more bitter to those familiar with Roma history. Renowned expert Prof Thomas Acton says, "I know of no documented case of Roma/Gypsies/Travellers stealing non-Gypsy children anywhere." Far from Romanies abducting white children, the truth has been the other way around. Hundreds of Yenish Roma boys and girls were forcibly taken by the authorities in Switzerland from 1926 to 1972. The children were placed in orphanages or homes for people with learning difficulties and their families denied all contact with them.

Criminal gangs that exploit children exist in every society – particularly poor ones – but the persistent linking of child abduction with Roma ethnicity per se is nothing more than the perpetuation of a racist medieval myth. We don't yet know the truth of the adoption of Maria by the community in which she was found, and this myth should be consigned to the historical dustbin.