On the day that he would die, Mark Scott's mother urged him not to wear his Glasgow Celtic Football Club top in case it brought him trouble. Zipping his jacket to cover the green and white hoops, the 16year-old schoolboy had laughed. "Don't worry, Mum," he said. "They don't do that kind of thing any more." But they did, and hours later Mark had his throat cut by a man who picked him at random from a group of Celtic supporters as they walked home from a match through a Protestant area of Glasgow. His jacket was still zipped.
In the six years since his death, sectarianism has continued to plague Scotland, claiming the lives of seven other young men, scarring and maiming countless others, and clouding the achievements of devolution.
At its most visible, the bigotry is played out on the terraces of the city's religiously divided rival soccer clubs, between Celtic's traditionally Catholic supporters and Rangers' Protestant following. But the infection has run deep across west central Scotland for generations, communities split by prejudice, boundaries marked by late-night violence and graffiti.
No one has offered a solution to this ugly, age-old conflict. But there is one voice that has not allowed Scotland to forget it exists - and now the Scottish parliament has proposed, for the first time, that sectarianism should be a criminal offence.
Cara Henderson was 15 when Mark died. They were classmates at an exclusive private school and he was her first boyfriend. Devastated by the brutality and senselessness of his death, her final school years passed in a blur of grief and incomprehension. She ended up in hospital with an auto-immune condition before moving south to study in England.
It was while she was at Oxford University, studying history, that she learned that the prominent Scottish lawyer, Donald Findlay, who had defended Mark's killer in court, had been caught on video singing sectarian songs at a Glasgow football function. It was too much. After graduating in 1999, she put her career plans on hold and returned home to set up Nil by Mouth, Scotland's leading anti-sectarian group.
In no time, the quiet, studious girl from the leafy west end of Glasgow found herself in Scotland's Barlinnie (top security) prison, talking bigotry with Scotland's hard men, and out on the grim estates of the city's east end, talking knife wounds with children who defined themselves by hate. She won endorsement from officials at Celtic and Rangers, and launched a devastating poster campaign with pictures of a bloodied victim in a hospital casualty unit, under the headline: "Sectarian humour can have you in stitches".
Henderson has been vilified by some fans for her intervention. At her first and last game between Celtic and Rangers last year, she shouldered vicious personalised slurs from those who chant hatred at the matches. "When Mark was killed, I didn't understand it," she says. "I was left with just anger and bitterness. Doing Nil by Mouth has been about taking back some of the belief that things can be better."
She has always been brutally honest about her own level of prejudice. She is Protestant. Mark was Catholic. When he first asked her out, she rang a friend to ask if she should date him. "I must have had a low-grade prejudice," she says. "It is very subtle, but it must have been an issue for me. It is an issue for too many people."
She asked permission of Mark's parents before she launched Nil by Mouth, and she has been careful not to exploit him or their relationship. She laid him to rest a long time ago.
HER hardest job, she says, is trying to convince people that sectarianism is not confined to football; that the bigotry of those who wound or kill is bolstered by the "polite sectarianism" that infects much of west central Scotland. "One of the problems is that debate on this has been limited to Old Firm [as the two soccer clubs are known] rivalry, so people view the violence and abuse as football hooliganism, and they can say, we're not football hooligans. But this is not just about football fans. The bigotry is alive and well in the middle classes."
She believes that there have been some changes - "I think it is becoming unfashionable to admit your prejudice" - but it has been a hard slog. "We are up against the wall with this, but we have been chipping away at it. You do get little chinks of light, especially with young kids."
Henderson has been frustrated that the fledgling Scottish parliament has failed to get to grips with the issue. Two weeks ago, however, a Liberal Democrat backbench MSP (member of the Scottish Parliament) proposed a draft bill to make sectarianism a criminal offence, punishable by up to seven years' imprisonment
Donald Gorrie's initiative, which has rocked Holyrood (the home of the Scottish Parliament), was prompted by a deeply embarrassing incident in January when the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, was advised not to travel to Scotland to visit a Catholic shrine on the weekend of a Rangers-Celtic match in case his presence heightened sectarian tensions. The scandal, like Mark Scott's death, prompted a fresh burst of soul-searching and hand-wringing about the bigotry, but nothing changed.
Henderson believes the move is highly significant and will keep the issue on the political agenda. "It is very important as a symbolic gesture. It says that we need to acknowledge this, this should have no place in Scotland . . . And there are too many people who are comfortable with it, who use it to define themselves and others. They may not even be aware that they are doing it."
Still only 21, Henderson has not wearied of the fight but feels it is time to step back, for her own sake and the sake of Nil by Mouth. She will still work for the group, but as a backer rather than a figurehead.
"In many ways I didn't know what I was getting myself into," she says. "Since Mark's death, sectarianism has had a huge bearing on my life. I see it in two stages: before and after. I know I'm still young, but when he died I felt that was the end of something. My childhood, perhaps. I don't know what kind of person I would have been if it hadn't happened."
She feels for all the victims of religious bigotry, among them 16-year-old Thomas McFadden who was stabbed to death after a Rangers-Celtic match in 1999, and father-of-six James Hardie, who died last year, and it hurts that their fate and faces are forever linked with such a destructive, divisive force. It hurts most about Mark. "The saddest thing is that his name has become synonymous with all this," Henderson says. "He had no part in it. It was not his life."