The Channel 4 series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding has been a great ratings winner for the TV station, bringing in an average of 7.4m viewers – the highest for any programme on the station since the 2008 series of Big Brother. Aside from being a draw for the public, it has brought a bit more insight into the lives of the Roma and Traveller communities, most of whom are of Irish extraction.

On the back of the programme, the deep-rooted cultural tradition of ‘grabbing’ has reached both the public consciousness and jokingly entered our vocabulary, perhaps a bit like ‘bunga bunga’ has in Italy on the back of Silvio Berlusconi’s wild parties. So what exactly is grabbing and are these girls as promiscuous as their outfits suggest?

Grabbing often occurs at pre-arranged gatherings, often in somewhere like a car park on the site where they live. While grabbing looks very malicious, the intention is not to overstep the mark but to simply assess if the female in question has any mutual feelings. It is basically a mating ritual with the girls slightly like bulls on parade. The boys try to tempt the girls away from their friends and attempt to get a kiss. If the gentleman gypsy is successful, then there is ‘something there’. Otherwise he has to forget it.

At these meetings, the girls dress up in very slutty outfits in a way not dissimilar to a prostitute. It suggests they’re very much looking for action – but their actions and morals are very different from the whorish image they portray. Traveller girls are not allowed to as much as approach boys. Their community believes in the ancient and, let’s face it, dying principle of no sexual intercourse before marriage and girls who break this code have to accept that the are considered ‘dirty’ and risk being left on the shelf.

Watching the show, grabbing can look violent and you can tell that the girls don’t necessarily love the art. Instead, they simply accept it as something that is part of their culture and also as something there appears to be no alternative to. Females are subjected to the ritual until they are engaged, which will typically happen in their late teenage years. One reason for them being engaged and married so young is the low life expectancy. Less than half of all travellers make it beyond their 50th birthday.

It is easy to look askance at the Daily Mail’s moral outrage, but it is fairly obvious for all to see that this tradition is pretty upsetting and degrading to see still going on in 2011. The show doesn’t get to the bottom of the complex cultural traditions behind grabbing. What programme that length does? In 2011 it is difficult to understand it, certainly when the young women involved appear to hate it. Perhaps it is a classic example of “outsiders” not understanding traveller culture, but I doubt it.