RONNIE Rowland sits and comforts an anguished woman in her cell. The women hold hands and the one who sits and cries has deep, self-inflicted cuts running the length of her forearms.

Ronnie listens to the woman as she talks about the torment that led her to 'cut-up'. When she finishes, Ronnie murmurs comforting words and tells her that she understands.

And these are no hollow words. Ronnie does understand. If any woman in the wing has an insight into the dread leading up to cutting yourself and the emotional agonies that follow, it would be Ronnie.

Look beneath Ronnie's well-covered arms and legs and you will find the marks of her own anguish etched in skin and bone. Scars have twisted the muscle tissue in her arms, deep marks line her legs and blood-red wounds creep out from beneath the top of her sweatshirt, as if someone once tried to cut her throat.

Someone once did. It was Ronnie herself. Not so long ago, she had a death wish.

She has lived with the emotional plague of self-harm since childhood and knows how difficult is can be to break the cycle. So when the woman huddled by her side speaks about her own rage, self-loathing and uncontrollable need for a release, Ronnie can totally relate.

"I would cut-up when everything became too much, when I'd reached boiling point with anger and guilt. The cutting was like a release of a pressure cooker," says the 31-year-old from County Durham, who has been inside the high-security wing for a decade for attempted murder.

The river of negative feelings has a very definite starting place, an original source that lies way back in her youth.

Ronnie's whole life changed the day her mother died. Ronnie can remember sitting at the kitchen table at the age of seven, waiting patiently for 'mummy' to return from the corner-shop so she could drink some milk.

Her mother never made the journey back from that innocent little walk round the block. She was attacked by a local 'weirdo', stabbed to death and dumped in a neighbour's back garden.

The news broke Ronnie's family, and her heart. Her brothers became distant and her father turned to alcohol. Little Ronnie had no one to turn to at all. As the only girl in the family, Ronnie had meant the world to her mother and now that her love was gone, she felt utterly vulnerable and alone.

Then, just when things couldn't get any worse, a family friend started the terrible, shameless sexual abuse that Ronnie was forced to endure for years. A wild sense of injustice began to breed inside Ronnie, injustice that verged on absolute rage. Why, after the horror of losing her mother, was this now happening to her?

As the anger built, so did her fear of the man who was doing this to her. He had beaten her up and threatened her with glass bottles if she did not do as he pleased. So her pent-up anger at him turned in on herself.

"At the age of 12, I walked into the bathroom one day after he'd been, got my brother's razor out and sliced my arms, over and over, until the anger went away," she says.

And she says right from the start, the sense of release obliterated the physical pain. At her worst, she has cut her legs to the bone, dug into fresh wounds in her arms and ripped across her throat with a metal staple. The terrible emotions anaesthetised the pain.

I never feel any pain when I'm cutting, however deep the cut is. I'm filled with blind rage and guilt and I never feel a thing. And I would rather hurt myself when I'm that angry than hurt someone else," she says.

Once Ronnie started cutting-up, she couldn't stop. It was the only release she could find under the weight of her dark, dirty secret. She used whatever tool she could to alleviate her suffering and she hid the red raw wounds with long-sleeved tops, baggy trousers and scarves.

But there came a point when cutting herself was not release enough. Ronnie's rage spilled over onto the outside world and she started to become ever more confrontational and aggressive with the people around her. Soon, she was regularly in trouble at school and one day, lost control with a knife. She ended up in jail at 19.

Ironically, it is was only under the close scrutiny of prison that she was identified as a self-harmer and helped to tackle the problem for the first time.

"Self-abuse, whatever kind it is, anorexia, bulimia, drug and alcohol abuse or cutting, is all too easy to ignore on the outside. No one has an easy treatment for it and you can hide it from the world for a long, long time," says Ronnie. "The one good thing that's happened to me in here is that I've dealt with my self-harm.

"The prison officers are educated about it and there are women who you can sit down and share your experiences with. It's like you're not so alone in here with your problem and you don't feel as guilty."

Ronnie has not self-harmed for around four months now and she feels a major part of the emotional rehabilitation has come through talking and expelling her nightmares though words, rather than turning a sharp blade in on herself. Now she wants to help other women inside and outside prison to overcome the cycle of self abuse. "It's like I spent years building a wall around me, which gets higher and higher until no one can get to me. In a sense, I created my own prison," she says.

The Ronnie I find sitting in front of me now, warm and expressive and steely in spirit, is not the self-destructive Ronnie who came to Durham ten years ago, I'm told.

When she smiles, she beams, and the scars diminish under the strong, positive glow. But sadness still lurks in the memories of what she endured. She sees her mother's face in her dreams every night and she can never forget the ritualistic and brutal sexual abuse. Just as her sorrowful scars, only time can heal her spirit.