"When I first started going out with Abdul my parents gave me an ultimatum to either stop seeing him or to leave home. So we both decided to make a fresh start in Liverpool.

Even though my father eventually came round to the idea of our relationship my mother never did, and I never forgave her for what she did to me. I think, how could she have done that to me?

In my experience I have seen as many racist attacks on white people, and every time you open the papers you can see it happening. I feel as though I speak for a lot of white people who cannot come out and say these things. This is something that happens to both sides of the community and it is something we see and experience all the time.

If you are going to have a counselling service it should be made available to all parts of the community. There should be somewhere for everyone to go if they feel they are the victims of racist abuse.

I have experienced this plenty of times when I have been driving down the road, and a gang of youths playing cricket in the road have hurled abuse at me. And when we first moved here we caught an Irish woman throwing soil at my children and insults and abuse at them. It is a problem for the whole community.

I know that my children have also been the victims of racist abuse at school, but we tell them to ignore comments because they have no rational basis. I believe we should be able to tolerate each other. Just because someone is from a different background, that individual shouldn't be the victim of racial abuse.

Because we are from different backgrounds we can think of hundreds of times when we have been abused, and yet we are proof that mixed marriages can work."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.