#ThankYouForTheFlowers, a campaign to raise awareness of the unequal burden borne by women during the pandemic

To alleviate the impacts of COVID-19 policies, many initiatives have been developed by civil society organisations – NGOs, local governments, or citizens. A team of national researchers from the RESISTIRÉ project has collected and highlighted a set of particularly relevant initiatives in 27 European countries and in Iceland, Serbia, the United Kingdom and Turkey. These Better Stories currently cover eight specific domains: gender-based violence, the labour market, the economy, gender-pay and pension gaps, gender care gaps, decision-making and politics, environmental justice, human and fundamental rights.

This Better Story was collected by Monica Stroe.

 

In Romania, a group of feminist NGOs reunites under the movement #MultumescPentruFlori (#ThankYoufortheFlowers).

 

A series of collective actions for International Women’s Day 2021

This initiative consists in a series of collective actions that are mostly physical but are spread and organized digitally. The actions happened on International Women’s Day 2021, including: a protest directed against the Government’s failure to address women’s issues such as violence, poverty, lack of access to health services, personal safety; public debates about sexual violence, domestic violence and access to justice, and set of demands of regulatory laws, including electronic monitoring of perpetrators. The series of actions are intended as an advocacy and awareness campaign about the unequal burden of the pandemic on women.

 

A lack of visibility limits the impacts

The main barriers to the network’s actions, including this one, are the moderate participation and the lack of media visibility of the events, as well as the territorial coverage of the offline events (public protests), restricted mainly to the two largest cities.

 

 

Image by #MultumescPentruFlori movement