The revelation of official ineptitude over the hounding to death of Fiona Pilkington and her profoundly disabled daughter came as no shock to me, because I have met Asher Nardone and her two sons.

Asher is a blonde, energetic woman with care lines etched deep into her face. When she speaks it is like receiving the full force of an avalanche. Her life for the past few years has been a living hell and she needs to talk about it. She is a fighter but the tears come readily and I find myself hugging her, mopping up and sharing her tears.

Callum, her elder son, has severe cerebral palsy, is almost blind and has life-threatening epilepsy. Asher and her younger son, Guarin, told me about the abuse and bullying by thugs that have become part of their daily life on a council estate in Poole, Dorset. At first I found it hard to credit as it seemed so inhuman. But when I walked with Guarin around the estate I discovered they were telling me nothing less than the horrible truth.

I have rarely met a more unhappy 10-year-old, worn down beyond his years, not only coping with the burden of having a severely disabled brother and being the only sibling, but also suffering persecution and abuse. Recently, after being attacked when he dared to go out to play with a friend, he began acting out attempts at suicide with bleach and the cord of his dressing gown.

As the mother of a disabled child — my 14-year-old daughter Domenica has Down’s syndrome — I know how ferociously protective any mother is of a vulnerable child. I am hypersensitive to any slight she might receive. I cannot imagine how painful it must be for mothers such as Asher and Fiona Pilkington to have their children subjected to deliberate torment.

One of the most upsetting things in the Pilkington case — revealed at the inquest into how she killed herself and her daughter — was that she kept logs in which she recorded that the police said the abuse she suffered from neighbours was a problem for the local authority and the local authority said it was a problem for the police.

Asher, too, has kept records of her efforts to get those in authority to put a stop to the unceasing abuse. “They just kept passing the buck,” she told me.

She feels that because she lives on a council estate she is pigeonholed as being thick and stupid and crimes seem to be taken less seriously than if she lived in a “nice” area. Police and councils do not react and the lack of empathy or any desire to help makes her feel crushed by the whole of society.

Far from being thick, she is an intelligent and inspirational 39-year-old who, before giving up work to look after Callum, made a good living in car sales.

I spent two days with Asher and her boys in the course of filming a BBC documentary on the difficulties facing such families in Britain. They were housed by Poole council in May 2006 — unaware that members of the family next door had convictions for assault and a long history of terrorising the neighbourhood.

The council had tried to evict this family, the Hambridges, in 2000. What was it thinking of, housing a single parent with two children, one of whom is profoundly disabled and requires 24-hour care, next to such a family?

Asher’s new home was a pleasant semi, specially adapted for Callum’s needs and the carers who helped her look after him. The streets outside were far from lovely. The estate was dominated by several problem households inter-related in a nightmarish extended family.

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