I must admit, shamefully, that before things went bad with my ex, I had a stereotype of what a victim of domestic violence might look like. I expected she might be kind of small and skinny, with mousy hair. Plain, with not much make-up on, maybe she might wear glasses and clothes that were too big for her in colours like grey and beige. Someone who you wouldn't look at if she passed you on the street. Someone going out of her way not to be looked at, because if you looked closely you might see bruises on her pale skin. I imagined, and this is the part that made me cringe the most, that she might be poorly educated from a bad side of town. She would have to be, to have picked up the kind of guy who would think it was all alright to knock her around, wouldn't she? Right?
Wrong.
I am half-British, half-Dominican. I have dark hair, olive skin and deep brown eyes. I love wearing make-up and wearing bright colours and short skirts. I kind of like it when people look at me as I walk down the street, I'm not going to lie! I'm certainly not 'skinny'... I am five-foot-one of boobs, bum and bouncing curls. I come from a good family, and have an English Literature degree from one of the best universities in the country. I didn't pick up my abusive ex whilst cruising the council estates, I met him at work when I had just started my graduate career.
If I had a penny for every time someone has told me in the past six months that I don't look like a victim of domestic abuse I would be on a beach in Cancun sipping mojitos from a coconut right now. And it has led me to ask, what does a victim of domestic abuse look like?
According to our abusers, we are too fat, too ugly, too stupid, too boring, too untalented. I even know a few victims out there who have been told that they are unloveable. And yet, here is a collection of some of the world's favourite celebrities who have fallen victim to domestic violence before... Each and every one of them has probably been told the same as we have in the past, and yet they are also some of the most beautiful, sexy, intelligent, interesting and talented women in the world.
Charlize Theron fell victim to her father's domestic abuse to her mother. When she was just fifteen years old, her mother shot her father dead in self-defence.
