Roxanne’s made life harder for women suffering real abuse
ROXANNE Pallett claimed to have been beaten in the presence of witnesses, in a house filled with TV cameras, in front of a million viewers, who could all see she hadn’t.
After she was booed off Celebrity Big Brother following the fuss she made about play-fighting with fellow soap actor Ryan Thomas, she undertook a round of TV apologies in which it was all about me, me, me.
“I’m the most hated girl in Britain,” she said. “My judgment was clouded. My sensitivity was heightened. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
There are almost 14million people in the UK – 25% of women, 16% of men – with experience of domestic abuse.
They live with their abusers on average for three years, and the first time they call the police is often the 30th time they’ve been assaulted.
One of the hardest problems they face is making people believe them. Others see an abuser’s surface charm, rather than what happens behind closed doors. The hardest person to convince is yourself. To realise that you are a victim of a crime when you were told you made him do it. When the abuse dished out to Nigella, Ulrika, and Rihanna was made public, they showed it was possible to survive, succeed, and prosecute.
And now Roxanne has set it all back. Because of her, other people won’t be believed, violent relationships will be dismissed as “intense”, and criminal abusers will get sympathy while victims decide not to make a fuss.
There are 100 women and 30 men murdered every year, in part because they are not believed.
Roxanne’s reputation does not matter one jot compared to another crumpled body on the carpet.
But fantasists who lie to compel sympathy from others often do so because of a pain in their past for which they never had help. Roxanne appears to need the sort of help you don’t get on reality TV.
But before she entered the Big Brother house she should have had a psychiatric evaluation that would have exposed her problems.
When the incident happened, she should have been shown the footage so she realised the gravity of her allegations, and her mistake.
Instead, producers let her spend days elaborating her fantasy to other housemates, setting them against her “abuser”, letting them both break down in tears and confusion.
At the same time the show has lower ratings every year. You don’t need to be a cynic to work out why a mentally-ill woman was demonised on national TV.
It’s nothing more than a modernday witch-burning.
But if Roxanne has made it harder for a woman to be believed, then the producers made it easier for a woman to be blamed.
And two more women will die this week, while we were busy screaming at something else.
Producers let her spend days elaborating her fantasy