The Myth of Safety: Romania vs. The United States

Many Americans grow up with a fairly distorted idea of which parts of the world are safe. The United States is familiar, and familiarity has a way of feeling like security. Meanwhile, countries we know little about can easily become vaguely dangerous in our imaginations, particularly when they sit somewhere in that broad part of the map Americans learned to call Eastern Europe. Romania still carries some of that reputation. People hear Romania and think about corruption, poverty, trafficking, organized crime, or some general sense that things become less safe the farther east you travel.

The reality of living here has been almost the opposite of that expectation. Romania is statistically a very safe country, particularly when it comes to the kinds of violent and public crime that shaped my understanding of safety in the United States. The numbers were one of the things that surprised me when I first began looking seriously at Romania, but after living here, they no longer feel particularly surprising. They correspond remarkably well with what I experience in everyday life: very little fear of public violence, relatively little concern about theft, and a strong social expectation that people should look out for one another.

The Numbers Tell a Different Story

The clearest place to begin is homicide, one of the more reliable crimes to compare internationally because it is much less affected than other offenses by whether victims report a crime to police. In 2023, Eurostat recorded Romania’s intentional homicide rate at 0.73 per 100,000 people. The comparable international series for the United States puts the American rate at roughly 6 per 100,000 that year. The exact ratio varies slightly depending on the dataset and definitions used, but the difference is not small: Americans were several times more likely to be murdered than people living in Romania.

Then there are guns. The Small Arms Survey estimated about 120.5 civilian firearms for every 100 Americans, compared with approximately 2.6 for every 100 Romanians. That puts estimated civilian gun prevalence in the United States at more than forty times Romania’s. Mass shootings are extraordinarily rare here, and firearms simply do not occupy the same place in ordinary Romanian life. Romanian parents are not sending children into schools where active-shooter drills have become an ordinary part of childhood, and I don’t enter a supermarket, restaurant, festival, or public square carrying the same background awareness that someone could suddenly begin shooting. People argue here. Drivers yell. Tempers flare. Alcohol exists. Romania is not populated by unusually serene human beings. What is different for me is that anger does not immediately carry the same possibility that the other person has a gun.

Property crime tells another interesting part of the story. Eurostat recorded about 334 thefts per 100,000 people in Romania in 2023. For comparison within Europe, the rate was about 1,410 in Germany, 1,506 in Italy, 1,991 in France, 2,278 in Finland, and 2,737 in Sweden. Romania is not uniformly low everywhere, and Bucharest unsurprisingly experiences considerably more property crime than much of the country. But the idea that petty crime is simply something one should expect more of because Romania is poorer than Western Europe doesn’t hold up particularly well. Recorded theft is actually much lower here than in many wealthier European countries.

American property-crime statistics point in the same broad direction, although the categories used by the FBI and Eurostat are not perfectly interchangeable. In 2023, the FBI estimated a U.S. property-crime rate of roughly 1,900 offenses per 100,000 people, including around 250 burglaries and more than 300 motor-vehicle thefts per 100,000. Those numbers shouldn’t be placed directly beside Eurostat’s Romanian categories as though every legal definition and recording practice were identical, but they do help explain why the difference I experience isn’t limited to homicide. The United States has substantially more recorded property crime as well as much more lethal violence.

Sexual and gender-based violence are where I think the numbers need to be treated most carefully. Eurostat recorded 13.96 rapes per 100,000 people in Romania in 2023, considerably below the reported rates in a number of other European countries. Taken literally, Romania looks exceptionally safe in this category too. I don’t think we should take those figures literally. Sexual violence is notoriously underreported, reporting varies enormously between cultures, and traditional gender roles remain strong in Romania. I regularly see expectations that women will cook, serve, clean up after, and otherwise cater to men in ways that would stand out more in many American social circles. Domestic violence is a serious problem here, and I suspect the official numbers reveal at least as much about what women report and what institutions record as they do about the actual prevalence of violence.

At the same time, my experience of being a woman in public here has been remarkably different. I have never once been catcalled since moving to Romania, nor can I remember witnessing another woman being catcalled on the street. After enough months and enough cities, villages, festivals, train stations, markets, restaurants, and nights out, that absence became noticeable. I had become accustomed to certain kinds of unwanted attention being part of existing as a woman in public, and here it has largely disappeared from my own life. Those two realities can exist at once. A woman can feel remarkably safe walking alone while another woman’s greatest danger may be inside her own home. Romania seems to me to have a meaningful distinction between public safety and some of the harms that remain hidden within private life.

What Safety Looks Like in Ordinary Life

The statistics became more meaningful to me once I started noticing how safety operates in ordinary interactions. Not long ago, my iPhone fell out of my pocket in a Bolt. By the time I realized what had happened, everyone around me was helping me figure out how to contact the driver, while the driver had already discovered the phone and was trying to find me so he could return it. I’ve watched people drop wallets and seen strangers run after them to give them back. I regularly see women leave purses unattended in situations where I would instinctively keep mine close. Theft certainly happens in Romania, but I have witnessed an extraordinary number of small moments in which someone could easily have taken advantage of another person’s vulnerability and simply didn’t. What stands out even more is that these moments are rarely treated as extraordinary acts of goodness. Returning the phone, chasing down the person who dropped the wallet, helping someone who is stranded, or making sure a neighbor is all right often seems to be understood as what a decent person is simply supposed to do.

Over time, I have come to think this has something to do with a much stronger communal ethic than I was accustomed to in the United States. It isn’t merely that people know their neighbors, although they certainly do. Beneath that closeness I have repeatedly encountered something warmer: a genuine pride in taking care of one another and keeping the community itself safe and cared for. When someone needs help, people become involved. Food appears. Someone knows whom to call. Someone has a cousin who can fix the problem. If something has been lost, there is an effort to find its owner. If something isn’t right, somebody notices. Community is not simply proximity here. There is an expectation of participation, a sense that being part of a place creates some responsibility for the wellbeing of the people who share it with you.

I think that social fabric can be protective in ways that are difficult to measure. Laws, police, locks, alarms, and cameras all create certain forms of security, but communities also establish expectations about how people behave toward one another. When people feel some responsibility for what happens around them, another person’s vulnerability is less likely to become simply somebody else’s problem. There are more eyes to notice when something is wrong, but more importantly, there are people who believe noticing creates an obligation to respond. The returned wallet or phone may seem trivial beside a homicide statistic, but to me it reveals something important about the culture surrounding ordinary interactions. Safety is partly about the likelihood that someone will hurt you, but it is also about what you can reasonably expect other people to do when you are vulnerable.

That doesn’t make community automatically benevolent, and the gender question is where I see its limits most clearly. The same social fabric that encourages people to feed a struggling neighbor, return a stranger’s property, or step forward when someone needs help can preserve expectations that make other forms of harm harder to confront. Strong ideas about family, gender roles, and what should remain private can coexist with a genuine commitment to caring for the community. A culture can be exceptionally good at noticing the stranger who dropped her wallet and much less willing to interfere with what happens between a husband and wife behind a closed door. I don’t think that contradiction cancels out the protective power of community. It reveals that communities protect according to what they have learned to recognize as a threat. Romania can be remarkably safe in public life while still having serious work to do around the safety of women in private life.

What I Had Learned to Call Normal

The difference has made me think differently about the kind of safety I grew up regarding as normal. In the United States, we spend an extraordinary amount of money trying to create security through alarms, cameras, armed guards, neighborhood-watch programs, elaborate school security, and a cultural language built around vigilance and self-protection. Yet beneath all of that protection is a homicide rate many times Romania’s, civilian gun ownership on an entirely different scale, and substantially more recorded property crime. Romania has locks, police, cameras, and plenty of reasons to use ordinary caution too, but much of the safety I encounter feels less dependent on constant individual vigilance. I don’t think much about whether the person shouting is armed. I don’t routinely think about where I would go if someone began shooting in a public place. I can walk through a square at night without experiencing that particular background calculation of how quickly an ordinary situation could become lethal. I hadn’t understood how much mental space those possibilities occupied until they mostly stopped occupying it.

There is one form of physical danger here that I do think about considerably more: driving. Interestingly, the roads themselves have generally impressed me. The problem is the way people drive on them. Speeding, aggressive overtaking, tailgating, and other risky behavior are common enough that being on the road can feel far more dangerous to me than walking through a Romanian city at night. This isn’t simply my impression. Romania has long had one of the highest road-fatality rates in the European Union, and fatal crashes remain a serious public-safety problem. It is an important counterweight to the crime statistics because it shows why “safe country” can never mean “country without danger.” Here, one of the risks I take most seriously isn’t that another person will intentionally harm me. It’s sharing the road with them.

There are other problems that don’t disappear simply because public crime is low. Human trafficking remains a serious issue, and domestic and sexual violence deserve much more attention than official reporting alone might suggest. Corruption and organized crime exist. But acknowledging those problems doesn’t require being reluctant to say what the larger evidence and my own experience both suggest. Romania has very low lethal violence, low recorded theft compared with much of Europe, very low civilian gun prevalence compared with the United States, and little experience of mass public shootings. Serious public violence is simply not something around which I organize my daily life.

What I hadn’t expected was that the statistics would eventually become intertwined with the culture surrounding them. A homicide rate can tell me something important about my likelihood of encountering lethal violence, and theft statistics can tell me that my experience of relatively little concern about stolen property isn’t entirely imagined. But neither can explain the feeling of realizing my phone is missing and discovering that the person who found it is already trying to return it. They cannot measure the stranger running after someone with a dropped wallet, the purse left unattended without anyone thinking much about it, or the speed with which people gather around when someone needs help. None of those moments proves that Romania is safe on its own, just as no single crime statistic can capture the entirety of life in a country. Together, though, they tell a much fuller story.

Living here has made me think about safety less as a single number and more as a collection of relationships: between strangers, neighbors, women and men, individuals and institutions, and people and the communities around them. Some of those relationships here are healthier than what I was accustomed to in the United States, while others still have a long way to go. But in ordinary public life, I feel extraordinarily safe here. The statistics gave me one way of understanding why. Living among people who seem to take genuine pride in looking after one another has given me another.

Sources & Further Reading

European Commission. “Road Safety in Romania.” European Road Safety Observatory. Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport.

European Institute for Gender Equality. “Gender-Based Violence: Romania.” EIGE.

Eurostat. “Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics.” European Commission. Includes police-recorded data on intentional homicide, rape, theft, robbery, burglary, and motor-vehicle theft across European countries.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime in the United States, 2023. Crime Data Explorer. U.S. Department of Justice.

Small Arms Survey. Estimating Global Civilian-Held Firearms Numbers. Geneva: Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2018. Includes country estimates of civilian firearm ownership for Romania and the United States.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “Intentional Homicide.” UNODC Data Portal. Internationally comparable homicide data by country.

World Bank. “Intentional Homicides (per 100,000 People).” World Development Indicators. Data derived from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

European Commission. “Together Against Trafficking in Human Beings: Romania.” Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs.