Andreea Bragă: There is diversity and richness among the actors, organisations, associations, civic groups and informal groups that are part of the feminist movement in Romania

Vladimir Mitev

Andreea Bragă began her volunteer work in 2009 at the FILIA Centre, becoming president of the organisation in 2013. The FILIA Centre is a feminist non-governmental organisation in Bucharest, Romania, which supports, through research, advocacy and activism, equal opportunities for women and men, women’s empowerment, political representation of women’s interests and their participation in political life. Before becoming president of the FILIA Centre, Andreea worked for the Community Development Agency ‘Împreună’ as a project assistant and for Serban & Musneci Associates as a political researcher.

Andreea Bragă is involved in projects to combat all forms of violence against women and girls and to promote gender equality and non-discrimination. Andreea represents the FILIA Centre in the network for preventing and combating violence against women. Andreea holds a PhD in political science from the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest, with a thesis entitled ‘Violence against Roma women. Power relations between women and men in the Roma community in Valea Seacă’.

This interview took place on 4 June 2025, after the largest protest against gender-based violence took place in Bucharest on 3 June 2025, triggered by the shocking murder of Teodora Marcu.

Ms Braga, every few years Romania is shaken by a terrible incident in which a woman is killed. A few years ago, there was the case in Caracal. Now we have a new case which, on 3 June 2025, sparked the largest protest against domestic violence in Bucharest. What can you tell us about the current state of domestic violence in Romania, about the protest itself and its demands?

Hello! First of all, it is indeed an extraordinary mobilisation that has taken place in an extremely short time. Within 24 hours of announcing the protest, we saw 5,000 people gather in University Square and shout alongside us to demand that the authorities shed a little more light on this case and investigate what happened to Teodora and somehow condemn the state’s failure to protect women and girls in Romania.

This is another murder committed in an extremely violent situation that has shaken Romania, just like the Caracal case, which clearly showed the authorities’ failure to intervene in time. If in Caracal the phrase uttered by the woman on the emergency line remained famous, ‘Don’t keep the line busy, miss,’ (‘young lady’ being subsequently killed in a brutal manner – editor’s note), now we see that Teodora, the woman who was killed, had filed numerous complaints with the police against her attacker. He was an abuser who had been abusing her since she was 14 years old. She was in an abusive relationship and had a protection order against him. He threatened her and stalked her. She was unable to escape him under these circumstances.

Although she notified the authorities and asked for help, and even brought the issue to public attention, the authorities, or more specifically the prosecutors, decided to drop the criminal investigation because he did not pose a sufficient danger to society, even after she had lived in terror for such a long time.

As a general situation, this is the 25th femicide in Romania this year, at least that we know of. We do not really know, statistically speaking, how many cases of femicide there actually are. These are the ones that have been identified in the press, and I would say that at least the number of complaints to the police about cases of domestic violence is on the rise. Last year, there were over 130,000 police interventions in cases of domestic violence. This does not mean that these are the real figures, but only that there is an increase in the reporting of cases of domestic violence.

It is also a good sign that more women are coming forward and asking for help and turning to the authorities. At the same time, if the authorities behave like this and women see that victims are being killed, even if they reach the authorities, they will certainly push them back into the arms of their aggressors for fear of suffering the same fate.

So I believe that the Romanian state has an obligation to come before society, speaking of society already, to come and shed light, to say where it went wrong in this case, what it could have done differently and what it will change in the future so that other situations where there is a high risk of violence do not allow aggressors to commit crimes.

The protest that took place had certain demands for the authorities. What did the protesters ask for and what was the response from the authorities?

In the manifesto we released when we organised the protest, we asked for femicide against women to be recognised (as a legal category – editor’s note), but above all that there should be a mandatory risk assessment by prosecutors and courts in cases of domestic violence, so that there is a somewhat objective filter, i.e. to understand that what they perceive from their prejudiced perspective as unimportant may in fact represent a danger.

Death threats, the intensity of acts of violence, the high frequency of acts of violence, the carrying of weapons or other elements of this type are signs that there is a high risk of a crime being committed, and the authorities should then be obliged to take immediate protective measures to keep the aggressor away from the victim. I believe that the authorities need to take a more responsible approach to the issue of domestic violence in order to prevent women from being killed in Romania. In addition, our demands included training, awareness-raising, initial and ongoing training for professionals in the field – social workers, doctors, prosecutors, judges and police officers to undergo training and awareness-raising courses on domestic violence so that victims are no longer blamed and acts of violence by perpetrators are not minimised, excused or justified; to understand the dynamics between the victim and the perpetrator; to understand that there is no perfect victim who must behave in a certain way or look a certain way, that victims must be believed regardless of their ethnicity, social status, level of education, or whether they have reconciled with the perpetrator on multiple occasions. They must be treated with the same responsibility and seriousness every time they turn to state institutions.

At the same time, we are thinking about future generations and that structural change in society can only take place if we talk about education and we need education as early as possible for gender equality, so that young people learn what healthy relationships based on respect and partnership mean, and to understand and recognise different forms of violence and what rights they have and where they can seek help, and to combat the hate speech against women that is promoted by many influencers of this type of toxic masculinity, such as the Tate brothers, who treat women as objects that they can get rid of like possessions.

We also need policies in the area of education, but also in the area of immediate intervention, and of course we need the law that is now in place in Romania to be respected and implemented. We have good aspects in the law which, unfortunately, are not respected, such as mandatory funding from the relevant local authorities according to the needs that exist at county or local level, in small or large towns. There is no adequate funding in all counties, which restricts access for victims, especially from a geographical perspective.

Not all victims have access to a free state-provided psychological counselling and post-trauma legal counselling service. All of these are mandatory under the law, but they do not really exist. Beyond that, we need a serious information campaign by the state on the protection measures that currently exist and which ones work. They may not work perfectly, but they can work, such as protection orders and electronic monitoring bracelets for aggressors. This is from the perspective of requests and reactions from the state.

Unfortunately, I am somewhat shocked to see a lack of public communication from the law enforcement agencies that bear a huge responsibility at this time, such as the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the General Prosecutor’s Office. I saw a reaction from the interim Prime Minister, Mr Cătălin Predoiu, who said that we need better laws and that we will improve the legislation, but it was a general and superficial speech in my view, because we need the law to be implemented.

We don’t need to adjust the law just to tick a box and pretend that we have really made a change for the better. We need the law to be enforced, implemented, and we need transparency in this specific case and in other cases of femicide, so that a serious investigation can be carried out to see where the mistakes were made and what the judicial authorities could have done differently so that Teodora would still be alive today.

Speaking of the Romanian authorities, you did not mention President Nicuşor Dan.

I will mention him now. President Nicuşor Dan addressed the issue of domestic violence as a priority for his term in office in his inaugural speech. We were pleased to see this. I believe this is the first time in Romania’s history that a president has touched on this issue in such a speech.

At the same time, we at the Filia Centre sent an open letter last week to the presidential administration in which we presented the issues we consider to be priorities and encouraged openness to dialogue and the hope that they will take up these issues on the presidential administration’s agenda.

We have not yet received a response. Among the issues raised is indeed violence against women, which is what we want and believe to be a priority in this area. I saw that he was asked about this two days ago by a journalist who considers these to be priorities, and he did indeed say that social services in this area need to be expanded.

However, I have much higher expectations of the President of Romania, who has made violence against women a priority during his term of office. I expect, in this political context, where we have an interim government and things are not at all clear and there is not necessarily very clear political leadership at the executive level, that the President of Romania will bring this issue to the public agenda and somehow build a dialogue between the institutions responsible for adopting concrete measures, as I have already mentioned, such as the police, the General Prosecutor’s Office, the courts, to bring into the dialogue civil society experts who have been working for decades in this field and who understand very well the phenomenon of violence against women, to bring them together at the table, at least to use this role as a mediator to create a context in which to generate real change for women’s safety.

Something interesting about the protests and the fight against domestic violence in general is the involvement of Roma communities, i.e. Roma feminism in Romania and organisations representing this feminism. What can be said about this movement or trend in Romanian society, the challenges it faces and the solutions it offers?

Our colleagues at the E-Romnja Association, which is an association with over 10 years of experience in civil society, bring together Roma feminists. They are our colleagues who are also part of the Network for the Prevention and Combating of Violence against Women, as well as the Coalition for Gender Equality, with whom we work for legislative changes and better public policies. The perspective they bring is extremely important because they work at the grassroots level with Roma women and understand very clearly the specific obstacles they face, whether we are talking about institutionalised racism, patriarchal attitudes on the part of the authorities, or sexist and racist attitudes.

They bring an intersectional perspective and help us bring issues that are often invisible or experiences that are often missing when public policies or laws are designed to the public agenda. It is a movement that has grown. These organisations have mentoring projects for young Roma girls in rural communities, have created a real Roma feminist movement and stand alongside the general feminist movement.

If you had to review Romanian feminist organisations, what organisations would you mention, what are their concerns, their achievements, how many resources do they have and how much support do they have in society or understanding from everyone?

There are many organisations that identify as feminist. There are also organisations working in the field of women’s rights that I don’t know if they are necessarily feminist or identify as feminist, but which I would associate with feminism.

So there is the Filia Centre, which has been active for 25 years, there is the Feminism Romania Association, which is a very visible association, there are associations such as the Partners for Equality Centre, the E-Romnja Association, the SPICC Association in Timișoara, the CMSC Association (Centre for Mediation and Community Security) in Iași, and there are also groups such as Sex vs Barza, Ele Sânziene, and Absorbante pentru Toate..

They are somewhat more niche or smaller, but there are also informal groups of feminists with whom we do not necessarily work closely. We may have ideological differences, but they exist and complement the feminist movement in Romania as a whole. There are feminists who are in academia, who are not necessarily in an association or a non-governmental organisation, but who identify as feminists and work with students, promoting feminist theories in Bucharest, Timișoara and Iași.

There is diversity and richness among the actors, organisations, associations, civic groups and informal groups that are part of the feminist movement as a whole.

Now, from a funding perspective, it is quite complicated, at least for non-governmental organisations. There is a fluctuation in funding, for example through external programmes such as Norwegian funds, Swiss funds, structural funds, which put some pressure on organisations because they are not necessarily and practically oriented towards projects or the implementation of projects. They are not necessarily core funding, they are not for carrying out the organisation’s current activities or strategy. And then you have to do fundraising on top of that. Feminism is not always appealing to many people, I mean there are still many people in Romanian society who have prejudices about feminism, feminists, they go with this idea that feminists are extremists, they hate men. It’s the kind of discourse that comes from ignorance, in my opinion, or they don’t want to be associated with the label of feminism.

But we are trying at least to diversify our sources of funding as much as we can, we are trying to collect individual donations. We also have SMS campaigns, and in Romania we have the possibility of redirecting 3.5% of income tax that goes to the state. Citizens can choose to redirect up to 3.5% of this income tax to an association. And so we also have a campaign in this area. We are trying to organise training courses for people in corporations who want to learn about sexual harassment, discrimination and violence against women.

We also run these training sessions for a fee. We are trying to raise money to carry out our work as much as possible, because otherwise we would not be able to do so much feminist work, or at least not for such a long period of time. It would be much more difficult if we didn’t have our full attention on this feminist work, if we had a job elsewhere and only volunteered for a few hours. You couldn’t achieve the same results because it wouldn’t be the same effort.

We are seeing a rise in the MAGA trend around the world, including in our region. But I think that at the same time we are also seeing a counter-reaction, as we saw in the Romanian elections, where the far right lost. How does this struggle, which is presented as cultural but is perhaps also geopolitical in a sense, influence the work of your organisation? I am referring to the struggle between the MAGA trend and the trend that some describe as feminist, LGBT and so on…

There was a moment of tension with the elections in Romania. It manifested itself in last year’s cancelled elections, when there was the potential for the presidency to be completely hijacked by Russian interests. At the same time, there was a real danger that we would now have an extremist president, a president who would have imposed, at least at the level of discourse and beyond, the values promoted by MAGA. George Simion had a kind of adulation for the new leadership, the new president of the United States of America. Even in his rhetoric, he strongly promoted conservatism, especially with regard to the role of women. This area of politics, anti-choice, would have been a real danger for women. We saw that he was even supported by the Tate brothers. So, for us, things are connected, and we see that there is an impact on society.

We cannot ignore the fact that George Simion’s defeat has made all the existing problems disappear. We are in a context of a strongly polarised society between liberal, democratic values and strong, traditionalist conservative values. A large part of the population supports these conservative and traditionalist values. And I think there is a need for dialogue, awareness-raising and information so that we do not see a strong rise of the far right in Parliament in the next elections.

I believe that there is a geopolitical influence at the ideological level. And I believe that there is at least a reluctance at the level of discourse among political leaders when it comes to addressing issues that could be considered too progressive or that would contradict the ideas of political leaders that we have to take into account, in the sense of ideas that do not contradict MAGA values. Somehow, we are already entering into this ideological cringe that can affect us in many ways. However, this is also a time when traditionalist parties must decide very clearly where they stand, what issues they will focus on, and whether they will still claim to be democratic parties that will always promote liberal values. At the very least, there should still be some voices defending these liberal values, regardless of the MAGA influences that also exist in Romanian society.

Foto: Protestul de la București (sursă: Feminism România, Facebook)

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