Ten years on: Sophie Lancaster’s mum on her murdered daughter’s legacy

Late on a Friday night, in the town of Bacup, Lancashire, a young couple were heading home from visiting a friend.

It was August, 11th 2007 and as Sophie Lancaster, 20 and Rob Maltby, 21, cut through a skate park they got chatting with a group of teenagers. Sophie passed cigarettes around the group, who were friendly at first.

Suddenly, one of the boys punched Rob, and four others piled in. They kicked him, stamped on him and battered him, until he lay limp on the ground.

When Sophie rushed to defend him, they rounded on her too.

The attack was so violent that later paramedics couldn’t distinguish whether they were male or female.

Rob woke up from a coma a few days later. But Sophie never did.

The motive? Sophie and Rob were dressed as goths. They were different.

The young witness who dialled 999 shouted down the phone, external, “this mosher has just been banged because he’s a mosher!”

Rob and Sophie's story – both the violent hate crime itself and the love story between them – is the subject of a new BBC Three drama, Murdered for Being Different.

Ten years on Sylvia Lancaster isn’t sure she’s managed to grieve for her daughter yet.

“It’s still very raw,” she tells me. “It’s been 10 years but it doesn’t seem to go away. You just learn to accommodate it, to live with it.”

The moment she heard about the attack on Sophie was, “just total confusion and shock. I just kept asking, ‘why would anyone want to attack them?’”

Among her many brutal injuries, Sophie had a boot print stamped into her face.

“I walked into that hospital room,” Sylvia says, “and I couldn’t recognise my own daughter. You walk into that room, and your whole life is just gone. It will never be the same.”

Rob made a slow recovery; doctors initially thought Sophie would do the same. But two weeks later, on the day Rob was released from hospital, Sophie’s life support system was switched off.

“I held her while she died,” Sylvia tells me. “I brought her into this world, and I was there as she left.”

From the age of 11, Sophie had her own sense of style, but it never crossed Sylvia’s mind that it might cost her daughter her life.

“We used to go goth shopping together, and I used to overhear people commenting about her and Rob. ‘Oh, look at the state of them’, or ‘who do they think they are?’ - that kind of thing.

“But it never entered my head that somebody would take offence to the way she looked.”

“Sophie was just proud to be herself, and I was so proud of her. She was a stunning, beautiful girl, and she just stood up there and showed people who she was.”

Judge Anthony Russell QC,, external who sentenced the five attackers, said at the time, “this is a hate crime against completely harmless people who were targeted because their appearance was different."

Two of the men are serving life sentences, external. The other three have since been released.

It’s exactly this kind of intolerance that Sylvia has since dedicated herself to fighting.

She founded the Sophie Lancaster Foundation, external in her daughter’s memory. It’s committed to creating respect for and understanding of subcultures in communities. Sylvia visits schools and prisons to tell Sophie’s story and talk about intolerance, prejudice and hate crime.

The foundation is campaigning to have the UK’s Hate Crime legislation cover people from subcultures, with 15 police forces now on board.

“It’s a real achievement”, she tells me. “It means that police will now treat attacks on people for their lifestyle as hate crimes.”

This new classification is far from Sophie’s only legacy, whose life has been memorialised in a host of artistic tributes, including films, external, plays and a festival stage, external.

“We need to celebrate difference rather than be frightened of it,” she tells me. “That’s a massive message.”

Sylvia used to be a youth worker, and knows how difficult it can be for young people to relate to people who seem different - and how that can turn into fear.

But why do we find difference – in race, dress or beliefs - so threatening?

Psychologist Dr Zoubida Guernina tells me, “people often resent other people who are celebrating their own individuality, and that comes down to their own insecurities. This insecurity is then projected onto others through intimidation, as their means of taking back the power.

“The solution is awareness. Teach people to tolerate others who express themselves, and to respect them, and you promote empowerment, not intimidation.”

Sophie loved Harry Potter, and her mum read the books to her when she was in hospital.

As JK Rowling writes in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, ‘”We’re all human, aren’t we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”

Watch Murdered for Being Different on iPlayer now.