Mother of child prodigy turned prostitute asks: Did our hunger for success destroy her?

By KATHRYN KNIGHT - More by this author » Last updated at 00:17am on 6th April 2008 source : http://www.dailymail.co.uk

Until a week ago, her instinct was always the same: any time she was away from home, Halimahton Yusof would scan the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of her daughter's face.

"I always looked for her. For the past few years I didn't even know whether she was alive," she says, her eyes moist with tears.

"Every time there was a story on the news about an accident, or a death, I feared the worst. I just wanted to know she was alive."

Child genius and now prostitute: Sufiah Yusof attended Oxford University at just age 13

Then, last weekend, she got the confirmation she desperately craved — although in an unimaginably sad way.

Halimahton, a devout Muslim, was confronted by graphic Sunday newspaper pictures of her daughter selling sex from the dingy basement of a Salford flat.

Styling herself "Shilpa Lee", it emerged 23-year-old Sufiah Yusof was advertising her services on the internet as a £130-a-time prostitute. It would be a distressing discovery for any mother, but for Mrs Yusof it is all the more heart-wrenching.

Ten years ago, the girl she still calls "Sufi" was admitted to Oxford University to study maths, at the age of 13 the youngest undergraduate to do so at the time.

Brilliant and determined, she seemed destined for great things — expectations that were brutally dashed when she ran away at the age of 15 and asked to be admitted into the care of social services.

In a bitter email to her elder sister Aisha, she accused her father Farooq of making her childhood a "living hell" by "hothousing" her in pursuit of academic success.

There have been many more twists and turns to Sufiah's story since then, too.

Just three years ago, aged 20, she was back living at the family home, apparently reconciled with her father.

Yet within weeks, a bitter argument over something minor — the family don't know what — led her to flee again, and she has not seen her mother or siblings since.

Until their discovery last weekend, none of them knew where she was or what she was doing.

Nor is this the only unsettling development.

Just a week before Sufiah was unmasked on Sunday, her father Farooq was jailed for 18 months after pleading guilty at Coventry Crown Court to two charges of sexually assaulting two 15-year-old girls.

Seeds of despair: Sufiah in 1997 on her first day at Oxford with her father Farooq and sister Aisha

Halimahton is in the process of divorcing Farooq, her pride having finally forced her to act against the man with whom she shared her life for more than 30 years.

She has had to ask herself difficult questions about whether she could have done more to safeguard Sufiah from the expectations of the domineering Farooq.

"I was shaking when I found out what had become of her," she says in her first interview since her daughter's lifestyle was exposed.

"No mother expects that, and part of me is haunted by the notion we had driven her to that.

"I have no idea what is going on in her mind, but I refuse to judge her and I want her to know my door is always open, that I am here for her.

"We have been through so much, but I have to believe that at some point in the future we can become a family again."

All week she has been trying to reach her daughter, but Sufiah's old mobile number has been ringing unanswered.

Halimahton says: "I haven't seen the pictures in the papers, and I don't want to see them. My sons have told me it's not good for my heart. I want to think of her as I remember her.

"I have no idea why she's doing this, whether she's trying to make her father angry or whether it's just desperation.

"I only wish I knew her state of mind but she asked me to let go of her and I did.

"I asked my solicitor if there is anything I can do to help her, but she's an adult and beyond my reach. I can only pray that she comes to her senses.

"My friends are shocked but they remember our relationship, how close we were and they have told me she needs help."

So does she lay the blame at her husband's door?

"I'm not the blaming kind. There's no use trying to point the finger. All I can hope is Farooq and Sufi look at themselves and sort out the issues they have. Deep in her heart, Sufi is a kind and gentle girl and I just hope she finds her true self again."

One comfort is that with the exception of Sufiah and now Farooq, the family remain close.

Three of Halimahton's other children — Abraham, 26, Iskander, 21, and 14-year-old Zuleika — live at the comfortable five-bedroom family home on the outskirts of Coventry, while her eldest daughter Aisha, 25, lives nearby with her husband and visits regularly.

All fiercely intelligent — Iskander attended Warwick University from the age of 12, and Aisha at the age of 15 — they seem to have escaped the tortured circumstances their sister finds herself in, and do not seem a dysfunctional clan.

The house is warm and comfortable, strewn with the usual paraphernalia of family life.

2004: She marries Jonathan Marshall

At its centre, Halimahton clearly retains a close bond with her children. Yet it is within this same family that, as a teenager, Sufiah, in that angry email written after she had run away from Oxford, claimed she had been subjected to "years of physical and emotional abuse".

Her father, she said, bullied his children intellectually and physically, flying into fits of rage if he felt they were not working hard enough.

The routine was so effective that at 12 Sufiah had already passed three A-levels.

Today, her siblings agree their father could be difficult but insist he was not fundamentally violent.

"It was like he had something to prove, as if he wanted to use us to get back at the world," Iskander, a computer programmer, says.

"He would be fine but then he would scream and shout. It was the thought of it that scared us as much as it happening."

On occasions he smacked them.

For a woman clearly devoted to her children, it seems odd Halimahton did not intervene — but while she considered leaving, she felt trapped by financial worries and the belief that her husband, at heart, had good intentions.

Theirs was not the most conventional of romances.

Halimahton, 51, had arrived in this country from her native Malaysia as a 19-year-old to take up a sponsored study course at Oxford College of Further Education.

Within months she had met Farooq Yusof, also a student who was living in the same block of rented accommodation.

Both Muslim, the couple quickly married in a small ceremony in Oxford in 1975.

By the mid-Eighties, they had produced four children, who were all remarkably bright, but Sufiah particularly so.

"When she was barely 18 months she could sing whole nursery rhymes.

"She could recognise numbers and letters at ten months old, and do a 20-piece jigsaw upside down.

"Farooq said she was a little genius even when she was a baby."

Eventually all the children were home-schooled, after Sufiah had told her mother at the age of five: "I don't like it at school, I want you to teach me."

Her siblings apparently felt the same.

But life at home was under a dark cloud.

In 1989, Farooq had gone on the run, implicated in a £1.5million mortgage fraud, leaving Halimahton alone to rear four children.

"I didn't even have the energy to be angry with him," she says. "I was exhausted trying to make ends meet and look after the kids."

Three years later, in 1992, her husband was arrested on his return to this country and given a three-year prison sentence for obtaining mortgages by deception.

When he was released, there was inevitably a difficult period of occurred to me to separate, but I had this belief that children need both parents,' Halimahton says.

"In hindsight, I can see this was perhaps the wrong decision, but I kept asking myself: 'If I was one of the children, what would I want?'

"I was exhausted, and I had four children who I felt needed their father."

Within months of Farooq's return she had conceived again, later giving birth to daughter Zuleika, now 14.

"Farooq could be difficult and I would try to talk to him, but I would not have picked Sufi out as suffering — she was the one who got criticised least," she says.

"But I realise now she kept everything bottled up."

Nonetheless, it is not difficult to imagine the impact this pressured environment had on a clever adolescent mind.

So brilliant was Sufiah that by 12, she had been accepted to study maths at Oxford.

"Whenever we asked her, she was adamant she wanted to go," Halimahton says.

But the family did not take into account the fact that Sufiah was still a child — on the day she enrolled she chipped her front tooth while riding on a seesaw.

When asked how she was coping with her degree, Sufiah would maintain she was "fine".

In fact, she was struggling under what she felt was an increasing pressure to perform.

"My father found out she had not been doing as well as he hoped and he took it very badly," Iskander says.

"He became obsessed with her getting back on track. For Sufi it only exacerbated the pressure she put on herself. She felt she couldn't get away from him."

But any danger signals passed by largely unnoticed by the family until it was too late.

On June 22, 2000, the day she should have boarded a train home from Oxford after finishing her third year exams, Sufiah got on a train to the South Coast instead, leaving most of her possessions behind.

"I had spoken to her in the morning and she sounded flat, which I couldn't understand. I offered to pick her up and she said: 'I'm OK momma, I'll make my own way.'"

And she did, to Bournemouth, where she found work as a waitress, finding the time to send that bitter email to her parents.

When traced by the police three weeks later, she asked to be taken into foster care. It was a desperate time for her mother.

"I was deeply upset," she says. "I didn't understand why it had got to this, why she had not tried to talk to me.

"But I didn't want to fight her. I thought: 'If she's unhappy, let her go, let her do what she needs to do.'

"My main concern was that she was safe."

Halimahton's eyes fill with tears, her thoughts tormented by what might have been.

"Maybe this was a mistake. Perhaps if I had been firmer, then perhaps what has happened now, well …"

In fact, there was to be reconciliation: Sufiah was happy to allow her mother and siblings to visit her, but not her father.

"If I tried to talk to her about what had happened, she would say: “It's fine now, I don't want to upset you”, her mother recalls.

Sufiah seemed to be getting back on her feet.

She was studying again at the local college, and talked of going back to Oxford, returning aged 18 to take the final year of her four-year course.

There, shortly after arrival, she met Jonathan Marshall, a law student four years her senior.

He converted to Islam for the sake of his young girlfriend, and the couple married within months.

With her newfound happiness, Sufiah agreed to introduce her fiancé to her father after three years of estrangement.

"She was anxious, I could see, but it all unfolded very calmly," Halimahton remembers.

"Her father hugged her and she hugged him back."

All the family attended the civil wedding dinner in July 2004, and when, in the spring of 2005, Jonathan was posted to Singapore on a short-term job contract, Sufiah, who had been working for a building contractor in Oxford, moved back to the family home.

The events of the past, however, were clearly never far from her mind: her brother Iskander recalls how, during one emotional discussion, his sister demanded an apology from her father for his behaviour in the past.

"He said he was sorry, and she seemed happy with that, but I remember wondering if it was enough," he says.

It clearly wasn't. Within days, an argument was sparked between Sufiah and her father and she packed her bags and left the family home for good.

"They had a row and I heard Farooq tell her to shut up, then within minutes she had packed her bags and was out the door," Halimahton recalls.

"I rang her and she was getting a train to London. She said: 'I'm fed up with him, he needs psychiatric help.'"

Astonishingly, she has had no verbal contact with her daughter since.

Voicemails and emails passed unanswered, the only contact a terse email, sent in August 2005, in which Sufiah revealed that she and her husband Jonathan were separated.

She said she wanted no further contact with any member of her family under any circumstances.

"I felt numb," Halimahton says. "I didn't understand why she felt this way. I always thought her quarrel was with her father, not us.

"But I knew it was pointless to fight her, I had to respect her decision. I could only hope she would come back to us."

So far, of course, that hasn't happened.

Instead, Sufiah has gone down the most depressing path imaginable, reduced to selling her body to strangers — presumably to fund an economics course she is pursuing in London.

It seems the final desperate act of a profoundly troubled girl, who can only have been further distressed by news of her father's recent misdemeanors.

Halimahton is as bewildered by her husband's conviction as she is her daughter's behaviour.

"At first I thought there must have been a mistake," she says. "There was never anything to suggest..." she blinks.

"I thought these two girls weren't telling the truth. But after he pleaded guilty, I had to accept they were. I have to accept he has confessed."

His incarceration has, at least, encouraged Halimahton to divorce him.

And without Farooq in the house, Halimahton hopes Sufiah might feel able to return — and that she might finally be able to prise from her daughter quite how her upbringing came to wreak such psychological damage.

For now, however, it seems the brilliant little girl who could do jigsaw puzzles as a baby remains hopelessly incapable of pulling together the pieces of her own fractured life.