Fiona’s Story: A Tragedy of Our Times

As Irene Ivison read this in a newspaper at home in Sheffield she instinctively knew it was her child Fiona. Despite her desperate and insistent attempts to bring her daughter home - calling in social workers and police to help - the young teenager slipped through the net that her safe middle-class upbringing offered her, and ended up in the hands of pimps and drug-dealers. Her daughter’s brutal death was the pitiful end of the promising life of an impressionable but high-spirited teenager who was determined to live her own life. But it was a beginning of sorts too. Just as Cathy Comes Home prompted a public reaction in the sixties, here a mother tells Fiona’s Story in the hope that others will hear and respond to the urgent issues her death highlights: how, in allowing children their rights we also compromise parents’ power to protect and, the urgent need for society to take responsiblity for young prostitutes.