Twelve-year-old Lara was groomed and sexually abused in her home town of Oxford. Her mother, Elizabeth, tried desperately to get help…but no one listened. As an inquiry condemns the police and social workers, Elizabeth tells her shocking story

Elizabeth McDonnell is sitting before me swiping her iPhone. ‘There you are,’ she says, turning the screen around to show me her current favourite photograph of her grandchildren Noah, six, and Olivia, eight months.

She swipes again and a new image appears – this time the smiling face is of her daughter Lara, her bright blue eyes looking directly into the camera.

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For several years, from the age of 12, Lara was groomed and trafficked for sex in her home town of Oxford (file picture)

We glance and coo through a few more – all of them affectionate snapshots providing an instant impression of a settled, secure family. Elizabeth, too, comes across as the most contented of grandmothers.

Certainly no one in the bustling coffee bar in which we are talking would have any inkling that this inconspicuous woman in neat navy trousers played a key role in one of the most traumatic court cases in recent memory.

Just under two years ago, the evidence of Elizabeth, and more pertinently of Lara, helped convict seven brutal men of what the Old Bailey judge described as offences of the ‘utmost depravity’. Lara, now 22, is one of the victims of the notorious Oxford sex ring.

For several years, from the age of 12, she was groomed and trafficked for sex while Elizabeth fought desperately to rescue her from the clutches of the sadistic gang manipulating and controlling her. Before the trial in June 2013, both women received death threats, which is why although Elizabeth can show me family photographs, we cannot publish them.

It is also why, although we are calling them Elizabeth and Lara, these are not their real names.

It’s a story that explains in chilling detail how Lara and other vulnerable young girls were plied with drugs and alcohol before being raped, tortured and sold for sex (file picture)

What is real is You Can’t Have My Daughter, Elizabeth’s soon-to-be-published account of those terrifying years. Indeed, unusually for books written in the aftermath of heinous crimes, it has not been penned by a ghost writer, but is her own work, eloquently composed with the help of diaries she kept throughout their ordeal.

It’s a story that explains in chilling detail how Lara and other vulnerable young girls were plied with drugs and alcohol before being raped, tortured and sold for sex. It’s also a story that lays bare the risks involved in adoption and the resilience needed to survive when you bring an outwardly loving and caring, but inwardly deeply disturbed, child into your life.

Now 64, Elizabeth was once, by her own admission, a career-fixated charity executive who regularly hobnobbed with MPs and peers at Westminster.

A solicitor’s daughter, born in Merseyside and raised in Surrey, she had combined considerable strategic skills with her innate compassion to help run organisations such as Shelter and Comic Relief.

Home became like a war zone; my love and trust were thrown back in my face

But worthwhile and stimulating though her work was, as she approached her 50th birthday in 2000, she recalls being overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy and pointlessness.

After two failed long-term relationships, she was once again single and resigned to remaining childless.

‘My life was predictable and comfortable but unfulfilled and empty,’ she says. ‘I knew there had to be more to it than this.’

In 2001, she made a couple of radical changes. She gave up her job and went freelance, working from home – a Victorian terraced house in one of Oxford’s most desirable residential districts. And she bought a dog, ‘to prove to myself I could look after something more demanding than cats’.

Twelve months after that, she had her eureka moment while listening to a radio programme about homeless young people.

‘I’d worked with the homeless and with young people over many years. I had two spare bedrooms and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of the solution before.’

Her idea was to offer a refuge to care leavers – teenagers leaving children’s homes and needing a halfway house. But when she called Oxfordshire County Council social services department, they had a different suggestion – had she considered adoption?

Lara had been taken away from her heroin addict birth mother at the age of four because of extreme abuse and neglect (file picture)

‘I’d assumed that, at 51, I was too old,’ she says. But neither age, nor her marital status, was a barrier, she was told. ‘The excitement really kicked in then – I allowed myself to believe that I could become a mum after all.’

The adoption assessment process was rigorous, but far less protracted than she had anticipated. She filled in countless forms and had several interviews.

How would she feel about a child making a mess of her ordered house?

‘Houses can always be tidied up again,’ she replied. What about not being able to call her life her own? ‘But I’m tired of only having me in my life. I want to share it,’ she insisted.

Within six months, she had been approved and ticked the boxes agreeing that she would take on a child with learning difficulties or behavioural problems if necessary. ‘The one area I said I didn’t think I could cope with was sexual abuse – simply because I had no experience of it.’

Elizabeth first set eyes on Lara in an adoption magazine. She struggled initially with the ‘Argos-style catalogue’ concept – ‘browsing through these bright little faces as though looking for a new vacuum cleaner’.

But then she spotted ten-year-old Lara’s wistful smile and read about her hopes of finding a ‘forever family’. Within weeks, social workers had set up an introduction. ‘It was a bit like a first date – slightly awkward. But she was lovely, funny and impeccably behaved.

And she asked if she could call me Mum. That meant a huge amount to me but afterwards, I realised, probably not so much to her, because I was the ninth or tenth potential mum to come into her life.’

Lara had been taken away from her heroin addict birth mother at the age of four because of extreme abuse and neglect. Along with her sister Kirsten, who is a year older, she had been fostered and then placed with another family with a view to adoption.

But that placement had broken down after the family was found guilty of physical abuse and cruelty towards both girls. Kirsten no longer wanted to be adopted but Lara did, so social services had decided they should be separated and Elizabeth knew that in taking on Lara, there could be no going back. ‘However tough it might get, I was going to be her forever mum.’

Lara moved in a few weeks after that first encounter, in February 2003. Elizabeth bought her a hamster to make her feel at home and they enjoyed walks in the park, but within three weeks Lara’s mood swings were surfacing.

‘She seemed happy, but in the blink of an eye, she could change and become incredibly aggressive and angry towards me.’

Those whose job it was to protect vulnerable girls like Lara instead treated her ‘like a hot potato’, according to Elizabeth, and none wanted to be left holding her when the music stopped (file picture)

On an outing to an ice-cream parlour, Lara disclosed to Elizabeth that she had been sexually abused by a grandfather within the family that had previously tried to adopt her.

‘I felt numb and sick – it was clear the whole family had known what was going on,’ says Elizabeth. In dribs and drabs, other unimaginable horrors from Lara’s past emerged.

Much later, she would reveal that when she was three or four years old, her birth father had brought men home from the pub and allowed them to sexually assault her for money.

‘She would try to make herself invisible under a blanket and would lie there trying not to breathe until the blanket was pulled away and some drunken pervert was leering down at her.’

This ‘torrent of depravity’ helped Elizabeth begin to understand Lara’s increasingly disturbing behaviour, but it didn’t give her the tools to deal with it. Within months of coming to live with Elizabeth, Lara had to make the transition to secondary school – Elizabeth fought hard for her to be kept down a year at primary level to give her a chance to catch up both emotionally and academically, but the authorities refused to make allowances.

And from that point on, what Elizabeth describes as ‘the downward spiral of risk-taking, defiance and denial’ began. Lara started getting into playground fights, sloping off to the park and drinking and smoking with older boys, and landing detentions at school. Home, meanwhile, became ‘like a war zone’ as Lara hurled vases and kicked in door panels during battles over bedtime and furious rows over her refusal to wash or change her clothes.

At a workshop for adoptive parents, the previously authoritative but now flailing Elizabeth asked how she could tackle Lara’s challenging behaviour while still showing that she loved and trusted her. ‘Don’t be ridiculous – of course you don’t trust her,’ the speaker told her. ‘Don’t let her believe you do or she will think you are really stupid.’

Standing up to those men helped Lara put what had happened behind her

‘That was shocking, but also liberating,’ Elizabeth says. ‘I had thought love and trust went hand in hand. But it was also upsetting because I was trying so hard to bond with Lara and you don’t do that by saying, “I don’t trust you”. As her mother, I couldn’t keep a professional distance – I had to rely on my gut instincts. So in many ways, I carried on trusting her as well as loving her and having that trust thrown back in my face.’

At school Lara gravitated towards children who were as unstable as she was and it was with one of her classmates – ‘Jennifer’ – that she began disappearing overnight.

The first time it happened was when she was 12 and at Jennifer’s house for a sleepover because Elizabeth’s father was dying. They slipped out, unbeknown to Jennifer’s mother, and Elizabeth knew nothing about their absence until she called to arrange to pick up Lara the following morning. Lara explained that they had been with ‘Jennifer’s boyfriend’.

A few weeks later, Lara was sitting alongside Elizabeth in the car when she took a call on her mobile phone. At the next set of traffic lights, she jumped out without warning and ran into the night. The police returned her home to a distraught Elizabeth at 3am after finding her drunk and, with hindsight, most probably drugged, in Oxford city centre in the company of two much older men.

It was the beginning of what Elizabeth now knows was the grooming process ‘except back then, I didn’t understand what grooming was’.

The gang, which consisted of two men of African origin and five of Pakistani origin, had met with Lara when she skipped school to hang out in the city centre (she had, by this time, been excluded several times and placed in a ‘sin bin’ unit away from mainstream pupils) and identified her as a malleable target. They invited her to ‘parties’ where they gave her alcohol and drugs – cannabis first but later crack cocaine – and once she was addicted, offered her for sex with unknown men in exchange for her drug supply.

Elizabeth’s diary entries reveal that over a 12-month period, Lara and Jennifer disappeared more than 30 times – on one occasion they were gone for four days. Every time, Elizabeth reported her missing to the police. On her return, Lara refused to say where they had been, only that they were visiting ‘friends of Jennifer’s’. Her behaviour was obviously far from normal or acceptable, but reading Elizabeth’s story you realise that there is no parenting manual for what she had taken on.

At one point, irrationally and illegally, she took the unilateral decision to supply 13-year-old Lara with three cigarettes a day, under the misapprehension that if she was going out to ‘cadge fags’ it might keep her at home. ‘I tried to make it a reward for good behaviour, rather than a bribe to stop her doing something bad,’ she explains.

She also put locks on every window and double locks on the doors, but still she could not stop Lara escaping, not even when she tried to drag her back physically.

She describes one occasion in which Lara pushed her and they both ended up on the floor, with Elizabeth clinging on to Lara’s ankles with one hand and the hall banister with the other, before Lara kicked her in the head and made a dash for it. It was one of the many moments when she was convinced that she had abjectly failed as a mother.

But when she put it to Lara that she was being used and sold for sex, Lara insisted: ‘I know what I’m doing. These are my friends. Just because you don’t approve doesn’t mean I don’t like them' (file picture)

But if Elizabeth was hopelessly out of her depth, she was also woefully inadequately supported by the social, mental health and education services, all of whom were condemned for their ‘worrying lack of curiosity’ in a serious case review published earlier this month.

Those whose job it was to protect vulnerable girls like Lara instead treated her ‘like a hot potato’, according to Elizabeth, and none wanted to be left holding her when the music stopped.

‘That was the biggest shock of all – here was I, who had worked in and around social care and mental health all my life. I knew most of the senior people professionally if not personally [she was a nonexecutive director of the Oxfordshire Mental Health Trust at the time] and I couldn’t get a single thing out of them.’

Letters unanswered, phone calls unreturned, application forms that went to the ‘wrong desk’ meant it took two and a half years to get Lara additional educational support. And when social services finally agreed to intervene, they sent her to have her needs assessed at a children’s home in Devon which had been infiltrated by a paedophile gang. Elizabeth tells how a white man called Mark dressed Lara and other girls in sexy underwear, photographed them and then put them on a train to London, where they were sold for sex in various West End hotels. ‘To my knowledge, neither Mark nor his London associates have ever been caught or even looked for,’ she says.

By this time Elizabeth knew for certain that Lara was being trafficked as a child prostitute. But when she put it to Lara that she was being used and sold for sex, Lara insisted: ‘I know what I’m doing. These are my friends. Just because you don’t approve doesn’t mean I don’t like them.’

As Lara went into freefall, openly using crack cocaine and binge drinking, Elizabeth withstood countless verbal and physical attacks – more than once, Lara held a knife and scissors to her throat. But although she was often frightened, she was rarely angry with her.

‘I never felt that her rages came from the real Lara, or that they were directed at the real me. A friend once asked, “For goodness’ sake, how many chances are you going to give that girl?” I couldn’t believe the question – the answer of course was however many it takes. I never for a moment considered giving up on her,’ she says.

She was sustained by the many good times – summer holidays in Cornwall and weekends with relatives in Wales – when Lara would revert to being loving and caring. ‘We would have these extraordinary moments, when she helped nurse my sick father and look after my frail mother, and underneath I knew there was a wonderful child in there.’

Lara was 15 when she became pregnant with Noah. His father is an abuser. ‘She knows he is one of two possibilities,’ says Elizabeth. Becoming a mother didn’t change Lara overnight – but it has proved to be her salvation. Although she continued to drink, take drugs and go missing for days on end after Noah was born, when he was 18 months old, she announced to Elizabeth that they needed to get out of Oxford. The gang was threatening to kill Noah, as well as Elizabeth and Lara. ‘That was the turning point,’ says Elizabeth. ‘And it has been transformational.’

Shortly after they moved to an undisclosed town in Wales in 2010, Lara agreed to talk to detectives investigating the sexual exploitation of young girls. In the ensuing months, she returned to Oxford for interviews and to take part in identity parades. The trial was ‘harrowing in the extreme’, but, says Elizabeth, ‘standing up to these men was the only way that she was going to be able to begin to put what had happened behind her’.

When the trial was over, a friend persuaded Lara, who had been almost reclusive since moving to Wales, to go on a blind date. The man turned out to be married and a shark – but weeks later, despite having used contraception, Lara realised she was pregnant with Olivia. Elizabeth admits to being momentarily appalled, ‘but more than a year on, I wouldn’t change things for the world’.

Olivia is a gentle, placid baby and Lara is ‘absolutely devoted to her’. Noah adores his little sister and is also loving school and playing football in an under-sevens team. ‘When friends ask him why he doesn’t have a daddy, he tells them, “I do – it’s just that my daddy wasn’t very nice,”’ says Elizabeth. ‘He needs to know, and when he is ready, we will explain everything to him.’

It would be naive to expect a miracle recovery for Lara, who continues to suffer flashbacks and is receiving ongoing treatment for depression. ‘She is like a kaleidoscope – ever changing. But she is also an amazing coper – unbelievably sensitive and self-aware,’ says Elizabeth. Lara’s dream is to work for the ambulance service and in September she will return to college to start accumulating the qualifications she needs. Her outlook could not be in greater contrast to that of her sister Kirsten, who remained in care and now tragically, at 23, is a heroin addict who has already served a prison term for robbery and had a baby taken away from her.

Elizabeth’s dream is that one day Lara will have the healthy, stable relationship she deserves. Does she believe that is possible? ‘Yes, yes, yes – and nothing would make me happier,’ she says. But for now, it is about taking one day at a time – days that, between helping with school runs and nappy changing, contain barely a moment for Elizabeth to read a book or do the crossword. But she has no regrets. ‘Every time I tread on a piece of Lego and curse, I also think how lucky I am to have a life full of the joy that my family brings me.’