The Bullfinch trial shocked people in Oxfordshire when we discovered that a gang of men were scouring the streets of Oxford and grooming girls as young as 12 for sex and selling them on to others to abuse right here on the streets where we live and in places we walk every day.

Seven men were convicted of 59 counts of trafficking and serious sexual offences against children. But how do those children pick up the pieces of their lives?

I travelled to Wales and spent the day with a person known as Girl Three in the trial. Under pseudonyms, both 'Lara' and her mother 'Elizabeth' have written books about what happened.

Lara told me, “I’m slowly recovering. It’s taken a big toll on my life but I’m okay now. The trial was a very big thing for me to do and it took a lot out of me. I became unwell."

I asked her if she could now trust men. “I don’t know what a relationship with a man is. I’ve never ever been around men who taught me what a normal relationship is, either father and daughter or boyfriend and girlfriend.

“I was getting a lot of attention from older men in their mid-20s up to their late 40s and I was just 12. That’s when I first met Mohammed Karrar at Folly Bridge. Over months he groomed me, knew what to say to interest me, gave me cigarettes, spoke nice, supplied drinks and alcohol. Eventually he got me on to drugs, weed, cocaine and finally crack cocaine.

“I was so out of it I didn’t have control of my body, and that’s what he wanted. He’d say things like ‘it would be a shame if your mum was to be run over or hurt’. So I couldn’t leave.”

Was there a moment when everything changed? “Yes. It happened overnight. We were doing drugs one night and the next day he told me: ‘You’re going to have sex with this man’.”

Is it fair to say he became your pimp? “Yes, but at the time you don’t know what is going on.”

Her mother, Elizabeth, took up the story. “What I saw was Lara staying out later and later. Then she started staying out all night. In the morning I would get a phone call to go collect a distraught and dishevelled girl, very upset and remorseful. We would clean her up and re-bond and would have a day or two when things went well. Then her phone would go and it was like the call of the wild. It was some call she could hear and I couldn’t, but when she got that call she just had to go.

“I tried physically stopping her. I put double locks on all the doors, window locks on all the windows. I walked round the house like a jailer with all those keys. I slept with them under my pillow, and I’d wake up early in the morning to discover Lara in my bedroom trying to get the keys from under my pillow.

“On more than one occasion members of the gang, some of the other girls involved, helped crowbar open a window to get her out. We would sometimes end up fighting. One time I woke up, realised she was trying to leave the house and we ended up on the floor, brawling with me hanging on to her ankles. In the end the police said: ‘Don’t stop her. Somebody’s going to get hurt. Just let her go and let us know and we’ll try to find her.”

I turned to Lara to find out when those calls came, the call of the wild, what was going on in her head?

Lara was very clear. “I needed to get to the place they wanted me. I always had to be on high alert, otherwise they were going to do something, come and get me, hurt my mum or my dog.”

“I was sent to London many times, Coventry and Manchester to meet men who would take me off and give me different clothes to change into, depending on what these people wanted – provocative underwear, heels, inappropriate items of clothing for a 13-year-old, a young 13. It was obvious I was a child.

I asked her mother how often Lara stayed away. “I reported her missing over 100 times during five years. The longest period missing was five days. I was fighting on two fronts. I was trying to keep Lara safe, but I was desperately trying to get some help from the education system, social services and mental health services; and I got nowhere with anyone.

“Lara was 12 years old. She was, in their eyes, a young person, not a child and therefore had some autonomy and some judgement. She was the architect of her own misfortune and until she decided to ‘buck up’ her ideas, there was really nothing anybody could do.”

I was amazed. “But you're a professional woman with a great deal of experience in organisations. You know how they work. If you can’t get them to sit up and take notice, then God help all the other mothers.”

Elizabeth agreed. “I had always assumed with my experience and my contacts – I knew one of the directors of social services professionally – I was on the board of the Oxfordshire Mental Health Trust, I could get something done, but I could get absolutely nothing out of anybody. You couldn’t negotiate that system. There was no way in. It was impenetrable.

“What changed in the end is that Lara grew up, started to get a bit of insight. Atheage of 16 she had a baby. One of the big turning points was her concern for his safety because the gang started to make threats against him. That really did shake her up massively. She came to me and started to tell me the whole story and said ‘Mum we have to get out of Oxford. That was the big turning point. It came from within her in the end.”

I wanted to get an idea of the extent of the problem. “How many men in the gang had sex with you and how many times did they pimp you out?”

Lara was quite open about it. “It was only the Karrar brothers, Mohammed and Bassam who had sex with me whenever they wanted. It must have been about twenty times between them. And I was pimped out I would say over 100 times without exaggerating. All different men."

I felt there was some unfinished business in our conversation. “Do you think something that happened to you may be happening again today in ‘the Other Oxford’?”

Lara didn’t hesitate. “Without a doubt. In fact I know that there are still men in Oxford that will be continuing to abuse. I think that is still going on…definitely yes.

“I know there are still men doing it because they wouldn’t suddenly stop now when the police haven’t caught them all yet. I know that myself because there are other men to do with me.

“I would say Cowley Road and Bonn Square are the main places you are going to see young girls picked up and groomed by older abusive men.

“The problem is they don’t see what they are doing is anything other than what they have been raised to do; I think that’s the problem. The men who were sent to jail do not see themselves as having done anything wrong. That’s why they were so arrogant in the dock. They laughed because they do not see it as abuse.”