Homicide-suicides are the term for homicides followed by the suicide of the offender. This study utilized police statistics, information from the penal files and an online search of news reports to establish the prevalence of homicide-suicides in Romania. We compare characteristics of homicidesuicides among current or former Romanian emigrants and Romanians who never emigrated. The estimated homicide-suicide rate was 0.005-0.146 per 100,000 inhabitants in Romania between 2002 and 2013. Intimate partners committed significantly more homicide-suicides among emigrants than non-emigrants. Emigrant homicide-suicides also had significantly more reports of prior abuse than non-emigrant homicide-suicides. The findings of this study call for improvements in intimate partner violence prevention in Romania and among Romanian migrant communities abroad.

This article presents the findings of a research project about the impact of Korean musical products and representations of Korea Romanian fans’ perceptions about the country. This research project conceives of Romanian fans of K-Pop as a distinct segment of the population and outlines certain prevalent characteristics of individuals belonging to this group. It also demonstrates the influence of Korean popular culture products on Romanian K-Pop fans’ assessments of Korea’s culture and society. The data stresses that “hybridity” and “globalism” are the traits most important to the success of K-Pop both in Asia and Eastern Europe as demonstrated in the case of Romania. At the same time, K-Pop fans understand Korean music as a “gateway” not only into Korean culture but also into familiarity with Korean language and society. The results also reveal a parallel between images exported by Korean cultural products in Romania and Romanians’ conception of Korean society and people.

No abstract

The rates of domestic violence and femicide in various European countries tend to be higher among migrant women, as well as among women from cultural minorities. This led to the development of a culture and gender-sensitive in-depth interview guide aimed at better understanding this phenomenon, as well as identifying specific aspects of the experience of violence in a foreign scenario. The first stage was developing a draft interview guide based on the most important issues addressed in the professional literature, relating both to victims of domestic violence and to survivors of femicide and their families. This has allowed others to “hear their voices” and to understand their own perspectives, which are especially important considering the steady increase of this phenomenon around the world. The second phase was a pilot study among immigrant femicide survivors: first in Spain, later in Romania, and finally in Georgia, focusing on internally displaced people. The last step was analyzing the feedback from the different countries, which led to a refined and improved version of the interview guide. Thus, the current paper presents an ongoing process leading to a standardized interview guide, which could be adapted to local socio-cultural contexts, enabling comparative studies across Europe.

There was significant media coverage of migrant flows in the summer of 2015 and public debate is ongoing. A central issue covered by the media regarded the risks associated with the entrance of refugees in the European Union, thus we decided to analyze the way in which online media covered the violence that involved refugees in the time frame of 1 June 2015–31 October 2016. The analysis highlighted that journalists were mostly interested in publishing cases of illegal border crossings and less interested in cases of severe interpersonal violence (such as murder, rape, and suicide). This time, journalists decided to publicize crimes which affected national security (therefore, they threatened the entire territory and population of a country) and focused less on crimes which involved hurting some categories of vulnerable people (women, children, or elderly people). The main changes that we identified were how refugees were framed regarding the place of the media and journalists as ‘secondary definers’ of crimes, and the positioning of the refugee in the role of victim.