It’s impossible not to feel a jolt of shock when confronted with the photo of Shamima Begum on the front page of this morning’s Times. Four years ago – when we last saw her – it was accepted that Begum had been brainwashed. There was consensus that she was an innocent child who’d been groomed online. Begum was allowed to be the victim in the nation’s narrative – one that over decades had grasped the power and dangers of grooming – because that demanded nothing from us. She was the little girl who’d been caught up in a dangerous death cult; the pixelated image of a kid caught on CCTV about to fly, and that was sad.

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It was also made easier by her absence. We only needed to empathise with Begum’s situation in the abstract. Of course, we wanted her to be rescued and returned to Britain immediately. But that was just a fantasy. I can’t have been alone in assuming these girls would simply meet a horrible fate in the fighting abroad. Having been found alive and nine months pregnant in a Syrian refugee camp, Begum is no longer an abstract concept. Instinctively it feels a little harder to say we should bring her back to her home in the United Kingdom – especially given her apparent lack of remorse. And yet is she not still a victim of grooming? Still a British citizen we should be looking to help?

There are already those arguing that since Begum left the UK to join Islamic State four years ago her situation has changed entirely. Ex counter-terrorism chief Mark Rowley told the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning that when Begum was 15 he considered her a victim. Now she is an adult what happens next, he argued, should be determined by clinical risk assessment and the consideration of cold, hard facts. He wants us to separate those grainy images of a young girl from the crisp picture of the woman she is today.

But to see Begum in isolation to past events serves no purpose. The brainwashed child she was has everything to do with the brainwashed young woman she has become. That’s not to justify what she has done, but to see the series of events that have unfolded in her life as being traceable directly back to her grooming and subsequent radicalisation. Children are influenced by those around them, a product of their environment. We only develop and learn to be better when another influence takes a bad one’s place. Since the age of 15 Begum has not been afforded that opportunity in the caliphate; it is unsurprising her views continue to be as dangerous as when she left – they’ve become her norm.

If she seems untroubled by the violence she has witnessed, that’s no more a sign of a callous and wicked villain than a vulnerable young woman who is profoundly scarred. We know that trauma in childhood impacts your experiences as you grow older. I can’t begin to imagine what she has seen in her life, what it’s like to have had two children die. What we told ourselves about that 15-year-old girl remains true to this day, except now helping this young woman requires more than just easy words.

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That’s not to say Begum is to receive a hero’s welcome back at Gatwick airport. To rehabilitate and reintegrate her back into society will take much work by dedicated professionals, be in no doubt. But to try to help her must be better than leaving this teenager to languish in a camp, to quite possibly witness her third child die. If rehabilitation proves impossible, at least back in Britain she can live under supervision and be kept from doing further harm – to herself or to others. And should, one day soon, Begum be in a position to rejoin British society proper, who could be better placed to warn other vulnerable children of the dangerous reality of online grooming, of radicalisation by extremists and the acts that led her to commit? Our justice system is based on the possibility of rehabilitation. It would be wrong to write off the prospect of anyone changing, let alone a vulnerable 19-year-old girl and her unborn child.

• Michael Segalov is a contributing editor at Huck magazine