How quickly the tabloid narrative has changed for Melanie Brown, aka Mel B, aka Scary Spice. For years the story was that she and her husband, Stephen Belafonte, were “wild”, “sex mad”, self-confessed “perverts”. And, OK, there were stories about how Brown’s parents were worried because Belafonte had a conviction for violence towards his previous partner. And, sure, there were whispers when there were photos of her with a bandaged face, and the time she appeared on The X Factor with what looked like bruises and a black eye. And there was her reality TV show, It’s A Scary World, which ostensibly provided a “lighthearted” view of their family life, but actually showed him insisting she have more sex with him: “I’m a super freak. I need to have certain sex. It’s kind of like taking my food and water away from me,” he said to her. Later when she asked him, “Do I still take your breath away?” he replied, “You take my everything away. You take my dignity, my self-respect.”
But that was just Scary being Scary, innit? Who knows what goes on in someone else’s relationship?
Cut to now, when Brown and Belafonte are getting divorced, and she is alleging that he subjected her to physical and emotional abuse for years (he dismisses this as a “smear campaign”).
How wise everyone is after the fact! The tabloids have been so swift to wheel out evidence that seems to support Brown’s claims – old photos of her that appear to show bruises, interviews with Belafonte’s ex, who reported him for battery – that you might think that what she is now saying was in front of everyone’s face all along. But somehow, no one saw it.
There’s been a lot of talk of late about how surprising it is that not every woman who is a victim of domestic abuse looks like Little Mo from EastEnders – meek, weak and working class, and still, 16 years after her storyline ran on TV, the popular face of what an abused woman looks like. Any time the storyline deviates from this image, people profess astonishment. HBO’s much-discussed Big Little Lies depicted Celeste, played by Nicole Kidman, as wealthy, sexy and trapped in an abusive relationship, and this, according to critics, was “brave” and “revealing”.
Two weeks ago, Judge Richard Mansell QC declined to send Mustafa Bashir to prison, even though he admitted to causing bodily harm to his wife, Fakhara Karim. This, the judge said, is partly because although Karim had been beaten with a cricket bat and forced to drink bleach, she was not “vulnerable”: she was “plainly an intelligent woman with a network of friends and did go on to graduate from university with a 2:1 and a master’s”. He did not say if a 2:2 would have made her husband’s crime more problematic for the courts. “I am a confident and strong woman because of what I have suffered. I was suffering for my life but the judge didn’t believe me,” Karim told the BBC.
Judge Mansell has since sent Bashir to prison – not because he felt he’d made an error, but because it turned out Bashir did not, as was said at the trial, have a job offer from a cricket club. The judge also complained about “widespread misunderstanding of my remarks”, saying he meant Karim was not vulnerable in the way a woman who came to this country with no friends and English language skills would be. And to be fair to the judge, he was going by the sentencing guidelines, published by the Sentencing Council.
But what does an abused woman look like? Given that one in three women will experience violence in a relationship, and one woman is killed every three days by her male partner, she very possibly looks like the woman sitting opposite you on the bus right now. What about a vulnerable one? I can’t believe this still needs saying, but men commit more acts of violence than women and, as a rule, have a physical advantage over them. Of course men can be the victims of domestic violence, but women are four times more likely to suffer the most serious assaults, and five times more likely to fear for their lives. Moreover, the idea that friends, money or education protect a woman from psychological manipulation can only be believed by someone who has never met many human beings.
So all women – no matter how successful, sexy, scary or lairy they are – are potentially vulnerable. Those women in abusive relationships who can’t leave aren’t heard, and those who can aren’t believed; and all are often too terrified to do anything anyway. The surprise isn’t that occasionally someone like Mel B stands up and says they’ve been abused; the tragedy is that more don’t before it’s too late.
