When she was 13, Laura Wilson and her family appeared on ITV1’s The Jeremy Kyle Show in a programme about out-of-control children. In front of more than 1 million viewers, her elder sister turned to Laura to warn her that “your attitude is going to get you into real big danger”.
Had any of them been watching the show, several professionals involved with the care of children in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, might have nodded in agreement.
Since she was 11, care agencies had identified Laura as being at serious risk of being groomed by adults. Her connections with other victims of sexual exploitation, and with adults linked to the serial abuse of young teenage girls, led her to the fringes of two major police investigations into sexual offences by groups of men of Pakistani heritage.
Yet at no stage did any professional take decisive action to give Laura, the youngest of four children in an overcrowded and troubled family home, the protection she so desperately needed.
Workers at Rotherham’s specialist child sexual exploitation project, Risky Business, suspected that a succession of men in their 20s and 30s were taking advantage of her learning difficulties to pass her around their friends for sex.
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A few weeks after her 16th birthday, Laura became pregnant during a brief affair with a 21-year-old married man, Ishaq Hussain, that interrupted her sexual relationship with a teenager, Ashtiaq Asghar. She gave birth in June 2010. Four months later, she was dead.
Her fatal error was to bring shame upon both Asghar and Mr Hussain by informing their families of her sexual involvement with them.
Both men were charged with murder. Evidence was given during their trial that in a series of text messages the pair mounted “a mission to kill Laura Wilson”.
In one text, Asghar told Mr Hussain: “I’m gonna send that kuffar [non-Muslim] bitch straight to hell.” Halfway through the trial, Asghar changed his plea to guilty. Mr Hussain was found not guilty after a re-trial.
His defence counsel, Simon Csoka, said that he was an “unfaithful philanderer” who slept with so many women because he was “in a completely loveless arranged marriage which had never been consummated”, to a wife “he thought of as a sister”, but he was not a murderer.