Thousands protested against a recent femicide in Bucharest, Romania. The protest was a response to the murder of a 23-year-old pregnant woman, who was shot by her ex-partner in front of her daughter in southern Romania some days earlier. Few years ago, the victim reported the perpetrator to the police, for death threats and harassment, but the police failed to act on it.
Demonstrations have been announced in the whole of the country in the coming days. The following statement of Socialist Action Group-GAS, the ISp affiliate in Romania, was distributed in the protests
Femicide is not an abstract concept. Femicide is a constant threat that women and feminised people are forced to learn to live with in the Romanian bourgeois state.
Femicide is when a woman is killed because someone realises she is a woman and decides to harm her because she is a woman.
The murder of Teodora Marcu by the abusive man who had been grooming her since she was a teenager, constantly terrorising her and forcing her into sex work is not an isolated case. Only its visibility is isolated, because this time it’s about a person who had previously been made visible by the commercial media. The case is a reminder of the constant horrors that male violence produces with the complicity of the capitalist state authorities, every day. Perhaps that is why it shocks and hurts us all so much.
No woman is safe as long as, anywhere, a woman exists as the property of her husband or pimp. As long as, anywhere, a woman is considered free labour for the family or (even) cheaper labour for the company. Violence that begins with women who work to produce and reproduce society eventually catches up with all women.
While women with a certain social and economic status end up receiving support and having their stories told, working-class women end up representing nothing more than the headline of an online publication, quickly forgotten by the public consciousness, already weary from the burden of life under capitalism. Unfortunately, there are countless examples, such as the 24-year-old woman who was beaten to death in Dâmbovița by her partner on 27 February this year, or the 52-year-old woman from Gorj who was set on fire by her 57-year-old husband.
We know that we cannot expect the bourgeois state authorities to do anything for us. They are there to defend private property and the positions of power of those who own it. The only time the authorities decide to do something for us is when they feel pressure from us. In fact, in 2022, DIICOT closed the case against Teodora’s abuser, arguing that this case was not relevant enough to society to justify the expense:
“the alteration of computer data is, in concrete terms, of minor seriousness, given in particular the content of the facts, but also in relation to the consequences caused, taking into account the time that has elapsed since the act was committed (which inevitably led to a decrease in the social resonance of the act committed, as well as the disproportionate costs that continuing the criminal investigation would entail” — this is what the prosecutor was capable of writing down.
It is women who work, produce and reproduce capitalist and patriarchal society who can put an end to it. It is they who can remind the system that depends on our labour that we are the society, not those for whom our safety involves ‘disproportionate costs’.
Through collective struggle and organisation, through strikes and sisterhood, let us abolish the private property on which the power of the abusive man, the boss, the pimp, rests. Let us dismantle the institutions behind which he hides from our wrath. Let us make room for a world of those who work, for those who work.
Let the traditional family disappear as a unit dependent on women’s unpaid labour and as a closed space in the midst of which abuses are hidden from the eyes of the world. Let domestic and reproductive work be completely socialised. Kitchens and laundries, nurseries and kindergartens on every corner—maintained by people, for people.
Let the owner of the factory, the studio and the office building fall from his seat of power. Let our workplace become the property of the whole society, and let us be free to decide how and under what conditions we carry out our work.
No woman should be forced to sell her labour or wait for handouts from an abusive partner because she has no other means of subsistence. Decent housing and living conditions guaranteed for all, according to need—only then can we talk about ‘free choices’ for each of us.
Working people, let’s all unite!
We want to be alive, free and debt-free!
In solidarity,
GAS – Socialist Action Group
04.06.2025
