The father of missing Hampshire schoolgirl Rosemary Edwards said yesterday he believed a body of a young woman found in the New Forest is that of his daughter.

Police searching for the 15-year-old, who disappeared from the family home after an argument three weeks ago, said they were not treating the death as suspicious.

Speaking from his home in Dibden Purlieu, which borders the New Forest, Rosemary’s father, David, said: “We are completely shell-shocked. The police are going to use Rosemary’s dental records to confirm it is her, but the clothes and the shoes matched those we thought she was wearing, so we believe it must be her.”

Mr Edwards, a computer programmer, told the local Daily Echo: “Rosemary touched so many people’s lives. It seems impossible to believe she was so low that she felt life wasn’t worth living.”

On a newspaper message site that the family had used to publicise Rosemary’s disappearance her mother, Jennifer, wrote: “People look for blame and answers but sometimes there is no one to blame. Some questions can never be answered.”

A keen horse rider and talented student who already had a GCSE A-grade in maths and a B in art, Rosemary had been due to return to school on the day she went missing. Her body was found by two walkers just after 5pm on Monday in an area of the New Forest known as Busketts Lawn Inclosure, near Bartley, which is near a walking track, 10 miles from her home.

The discovery came just days after a 100,000 reward was offered for the teenager’s safe return.

Rosemary’s brother, Robert, 19, posted a tribute to his sister on the Facebook website. He said: “Rosemary had a fantastically good 15 years of life and will be missed by all, especially her friends and family. We don’t know what could have happened in Rosemary’s life to lead her to the circumstances that have occurred. But I know deep down that she knew that so many people loved her and cared for her.”

Rosemary had not been seen since 10.30pm on Tuesday September 4, when she went to her bedroom after an argument with her parents. They had banned her from horse riding and other activities after finding out she had lied over how she lost her part-time job in a shop.

Mr Edwards, who was the last to see her when he went to her bedroom to say goodnight, has written of his regret at their last conversation together and his torment in blaming himself for her disappearance and of the events that led up to it.

Writing on an internet forum before his daughter’s body was found, he said: “Rosemary told us she had left her part-time job, but we later found out that she had been sacked for a minor transgression which shocked her employer and us because it was so totally out of character.

“As parents, we didn’t want this to be the start of Rosemary ‘going off the rails’, so we imposed a short ban on accessing the internet and a longer ban on horse riding.”

He later realised, from texts and emails he had found, that she was going through “some kind of torment in her head”.

He said that when he last saw her he asked for a hug but she refused. He then gave her a kiss on the cheek. He added: “I wish I’d said how much I loved her, but how many other parents do this constantly just in case it could be the last time you see your son or daughter?”

Police said a post mortem examination was being carried out yesterday.

HO, HUM. Another month, another rise in employment. Do you realise that, since the recession of the early 1990s, 2.5 million additional jobs have been created?

We weren’t always as complacent about jobs growth as we are now. During the depths of that recession many people wondered where on earth any extra jobs would come from.

So let’s take a closer look at where they did come from, with the help of an article from the Reserve Bank Bulletin, Trends in Employment and Labour Supply.

Of those 2.5 million extra jobs, almost half have been part-time although recent years have seen full-time jobs far outnumbering part-time. And remember that many of the people looking for jobs are looking for part-time jobs.

Employment in agriculture and manufacturing hasn’t changed much and employment in mining has grown strongly only in the past few years. Employment in the construction industry has grown strongly over the whole period, to employ roughly as many people as in manufacturing.

But the really big growth in jobs has come from the same part of the economy it’s been coming from for decades: the services sector specifically, retail and wholesale trade, education and health, and finance, property and business services.

Now, where did the workers come from to fill all those extra jobs? From the ranks of the unemployed, of course, but also from growth in the population of working age (15 years and older) and from a higher proportion of people in the working-age population choosing to work.

The greatest single source of labour supply, and also the steadiest, has been growth in the population of working age, contributing at least 1.5 percentage points to total employment growth each year.

The working-age population grows because of natural increase but also because of immigration, which has been more important in recent years. Turning to the rate of unemployment, it has fallen from almost 11 per cent in 1992 to a bit over 4 per cent. In terms of people, that’s a decline from 930,000 to 460,000.

Long-term unemployment (people unemployed for more than a year) rises during recessions and then can take a long time to decline. It’s gone from a peak of almost 4 percentage points of the total unemployment rate in the early ’90s to only about 0.75 percentage points today.

So the decline in long-term unemployment accounts for more than half the overall fall in the unemployment rate. Unfortunately, however, we can’t be sure that all the long-termers who left the ranks of the unemployed did so by getting a job. Some would have gone on to the disability pension and some the age pension.

The proportion of people who are unemployed for between 13 and 52 weeks also shoots up during recessions, but tends to fall back a lot faster when the economy recovers. They reached a peak of roughly 4 percentage points of the total unemployment rate in the early ’90s, but have fallen to 1.25 percentage points today.

That leaves the people unemployed for under 13 weeks. These people rarely account for more than 3 percentage points of the total unemployment rate and have now fallen to a generational low of 2.25 per cent.

So this group largely reflects “frictional” unemployment people who are just moving between jobs. The rate of frictional unemployment is fairly steady, regardless of which stage the business cycle is at. It’s nothing to worry about; it is unavoidable, even in the best-run economies.

The third source of labour supply is the rate at which people of working age choose to participate in the labour force by holding or seeking a job. The overall participation rate stayed surprisingly steady at about 63.5 per cent for most of the past 15 years, but since 2004 has shot up to 65 per cent its highest level.

The stability of the overall participation rate, however, concealed a continuing decline in men’s participation, offset by a continuing rise in women’s participation.

Each successive age group of women is better educated and more inclined to want to work and keep working after child-bearing. But, until recently, each successive age group of men was less inclined to work because of rising sickness and disability and, to a lesser extent, a greater willingness to stay home minding children.

But for prime-age workers (those aged 25-54), the decline in men’s participation has now stopped. That’s the first reason for the rise in the overall participation rate since 2004.

The other reason is a relatively recent rise in the participation rate of men and women aged 55 and over.

In other words, we’re seeing a dramatic reversal of the trend to early retirement (voluntary or involuntary).

The main explanation seems to be cyclical the economy’s protracted strong growth leading to shortages of labour.

But this also involves attitudinal change: more workers wanting to keep working and adding to their retirement savings and employers now far more anxious to retain the services of their older staff.

A WOMAN suffered a horrific rape ordeal after she agreed to play kinky sex games with her boyfriend, a court heard today.

Stephen Inglis, 19, bound and blindfolded the 31-year-old, before threatening her with a knife and saying she was to be his “sex slave”.

He then raped her, stole her bank card and used it to withdraw 300 before attempting to strangle her with a plastic bag.

The nightmare at the woman’s Edinburgh flat, on June 15, began when Inglis asked his girlfriend who had never had a relationship before to tie him up before massaging him and pouring hot candle wax on his back.

She then agreed to be tied up, blindfolded and massaged, although she made it clear she did not want to take part in any pain or bondage.

Dr Alastair Brown, prosecuting, told the High Court in Glasgow that Inglis then held a knife to her chin, asking her: “Tell me what this is?” When she replied it was a knife, he told her “good girl”, speaking in a calm, precise and measured tone.

Dr Brown said: “He didn’t sound angry, but she was uncertain and shocked because they had never done anything like this.”

Inglis then stuffed tissues in her mouth and taped over them. He bit her and as she screamed in pain he told her “that’s it” and she thought he was going to kill her.

He then ran a bath, forced the blindfolded woman into it before getting in himself. He then tried to burn her blouse with a cigarette and used the knife to cut it open from the front.

Just before she was forced forced to commit a sex act, she pleaded: “Don’t kill me, I value my life.”

After that, still blindfolded and tied, she was taken from the bath and pushed onto a living room sofa with Inglis telling her: “I think you should be my sex slave for the night.”

He then raped her, biting her on the breast and shoulder and telling his victim: “I’d prefer it if you would moan a bit more, it makes it more exiciting for me.”

Dr Brown said Inglis told her that his plan to kill her and then himself hadn’t worked, and that he would have to leave the country.

Inglis then forced the woman to give him her bank card, PIN number and mobile phone.

Before leaving her he took off her blindfold, but he tied her to the bed, cut the phone lines, and then went to a cash machine to withdraw 300.

When he returned he tried to put a plastic bag over her head and then attempted to strangle her for several minutes.

The victim’s eight-hour ordeal ended when Inglis left for a while before returning to untie her and beg for forgiveness. He then left again.

Dr Brown said that the woman feared that if she called the police Inglis would harm her parents. Eventually she phoned them and the police were called.

She was taken to hospital where she was found to have a large number of injuries all over her body including bites and an internal injury.

Dr Brown said that as a result of her ordeal the victim is now frequently tearful, suffers from nightmares, sleep disturbance and flashbacks. She also lost weight and her hair began to fall out.

Inglis, who was found to be sane and not suffering from any mental illness, denied to police he had raped her and said he considered killing her after she made the rape allegation.

He was originally charged with attempting to murder the woman, but the prosecution accepted his plea of guilty to the reduced charge of assaulting her to her injury and rape.

The judge, Lord Matthews, was told that he had a previous conviction for assaulting a woman, who was a complete stranger, at night.

The judge called for reports pending sentence on Inglis next month.