MOST people who have spent any time in East Lancashire during the past couple of years will know the name Sophie Lancaster.

They will also have heard the terrible story of how the 20-year-old was kicked to death in a Bacup park as she cradled her boyfriend Robert Maltby, who had also been attacked by two younger youths.

The pair were singled out to become victims of violence purely because of their appearance, and the fact that they were goths.

That was two years and four months ago and the 15 and 16-year-olds responsible are serving life sentences.

What happened on that August night in 2007 was truly dreadful and details of it went around the world.

But although it was horrific, there’s another reason why Sophie’s name produces almost 800,000 results in a Google search and has its own entry in Wikipedia.

It’s because of the fantastic work her mother Sylvia has done since in trying to highlight and eradicate the frightening amount of viciousness displayed by some teenagers which leads to the targeting of anyone who looks ‘different.’ She set up the Sophie Lancaster Foundation with a mission neatly summed up using her daughter’s name as an acronym – Stamp Out Prejudice, Hatred and Intolerance Everywhere.

A moving two-minute animated film has been made by a top French director of what happened that fateful night and more than 100 people applauded after seeing it when it was premiered on a big screen in Manchester’s Cathedral Gardens earlier this month.

It’s called Dark Angel and has been produced in association with iconic British band Portishead.

The Sophie story and the foundation’s message has reached as far afield as Australia and a number of states in the USA.

Sylvia’s aim is to raise £500,000 to educate youngsters at secondary school workshops about tolerance, and eventually at primary schools too.

A Sophie game has been put together on the same lines and through Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube it is hoped the film will soon have had a million hits.

After all she and her family must have gone through in 2007, it would have been perfectly understandable if Sylvia Lancaster had decided to steer clear of any future contact with teenagers, especially those with an aggressive-looking appearance.

Instead she has turned herself into an ambassador for change and successfully used TV, radio and newspapers to put across the message that youngsters must be made to see the destructive pointlessness of pack behaviour, or what the judge called “feral thuggery” that seems more and more to erupt into extreme, mob violence.

I’ve never met Sylvia Lancaster, but I take my hat off to her for putting so much effort into opening the eyes of a generation to the need to stamp out such raw savagery through education and appeals to common sense, rather than mere threats of retribution to wrongdoers.