The shocking thing about Little Eva is that she was a star. She made the song “Locomotion” popular long before Kylie Minogue gained recognition with it in the United States. Her name can be added to a long list of popular women who have faced domestic abuse. Jessica Simpson, Tyra Banks, even Oprah who has stated that “love doesn't hurt.”
This is something The Color Purple author Alice Walker, directly addresses with Celie's character who is not only verbally and sexually abused by her father, but follows her into adulthood where her husband takes a much more physical toll on her body.
Now, this is a guilty pleasure. If you've never seen Julia Roberts Sleeping With the Enemy, you need to. This movie is at it's core a psychological thriller with a candy coated plot. Not nearly as deep as The Burning Bed, the lengths to which Julia Robert's is willing to go to end her abusive relationship is astounding. This is one of my favorite movies and it's not hard to connect with her abject fear.
Hard rocker Alice Cooper wrote the song “Only Women Bleed” (Which is not about menstruation as some people suggest), but instead that only women are affected in times of domestic abuse. The great Tina Turner even covered it in 1999 for a greatest hits of Ike and Tina Turner of all things.
RuPaul, Madonna, and Pat Benatar all deal with child abuse with “Never Go Home Again”, “Oh Father”, and “Hell is for Children”. “Never Go Home Again” is certainly more directed towards a gay audience. Yes, Frankie shouldn't have to wear makeup in order to hide the scars, but a lot of it deals with the emotional side of abuse of not being able to be who you want to be. While, Madonna deals with her personal childhood in a stunning ballad that implies that her father was not only verbally abusive, but physically abusive, but that “He didn't want to hurt me. He didn't want to live this way.” Then, you have Pat Benatar with cold precision sets down the facts of child abusive in a sometimes graphic manner. Although, not a major hit, any Pat Benatar fan is likely to recognize it as one of the standouts from her album Crimes of Passion. One of the few hard 80's rock songs that songs just as hard twenty years later as it did when it was written.
A sobering fact to end this Throwback Thursday is that according to the World Health Organization forty percent of women murdered are killed by a spouse or partner.