When we talk about domestic and gender-based violence, we are actually talking about a multitude of forms of abuse and violence, mostly against women and girls, a flagrant violation of human rights and the main cause of women’s mortality – femicide.

Necuvinte Association has been working stubbornly and obstinately for 7 years out of the total 8 years of existance on one of the projects that will become a reality this year, namely the establishment of a specialized structure on domestic violence at the Romanian Police level which will coordinate the entire activity provided by law no. 217/2003 for preventing and combating domestic violence.

Given that the wide spectrum of domestic violence crimes is very wide, a specialised structure is the only way to be able to offer the best and fastest interventions and solutions in cases of domestic violence.

The United Kingdom, the United States and other European countries have set up such structures, which have proven to be effective both in terms of the number of cases resolved and in terms of the decrease in the number of people killed as a result of family crimes. Their model includes close partnerships with peer institutions: Prosecutor’s Offices, the College of Psychologists, the Directorates-General for Social Assistance and Child Protection, non-governmental organizations providing social services, Forensic Services, Bars. The structures in the mentioned states are designed both from the perspective of police work – combating the phenomenon, but highlight the victim of the crime by the fact that these structures have a close network of collaborators who come to meet the victims with the necessary services in an integrated way. This approach has shown that the financial resources spent before the establishment of the specialised structures have decreased, while the number of investigated cases as well as the number of convictions have increased.

It is a moment for which the specialists of our organization worked a lot, the proposal passing through the hands of several Interior Ministers to reach a “yes” today or it is our story that, during the years of activity we learned to understand from the word “no” , “not now” and move on.

We thank all those who support our activity every year and we promise that we will return with details on this topic.

Romania ranks 7th in the European top of spending on discrimination and violence, according to the report of the European Institute for Gender Equality (IEEG) in 2015, which estimates that the European Union has economic costs worth 380.9 billion euros a year to combat violence gender and domestic violence.

In Romania, the total cost of € 15.3 billion is divided between the costs of combating violence against women (€ 4.3 billion), the costs of combating violence against children and men (€ 0.5 billion) and the costs of combating gender-based violence (€ 10.3 billion).

These amounts take into account the costs due to the loss of labor productivity, related to the absence from work or the days when the victim failed to carry out his normal activities, as well as the money lost by the employee and employer, health costs. In these costs, a large percentage is the costs with employees in the justice systems related to the number of hours they dealt with cases of abuse without them leading to a beneficial outcome for both the act of justice and the person. victim.

Basically, the total spent by Romania to combat domestic and gender violence represents 9.6% of GDP (6.4% gender-based violence and 3.2% domestic violence), without solving the problem, while in the European Union, it represents 2.5% of GDP (1.7% gender-based violence and 0.7% domestic violence).