She was born with severe birth defects confining her to a hospital since birth, Rico's parents signed her over to the SWA on her eleventh birthday, where she was given a new lease on life due to her cybernetic operation. Rico loves her new body and life at the SWA, viewing each day as a blessing. She maintains a happy disposition, despite her treatment as a machine by her handler, Jean. Rico is only one who clearly remembers her past: that she was in a hospital, that her parents fought, and where her father works.

The girls of the Social Welfare Agency are no ordinary children. They are the grisly remains of human wreckage pieced back together with cybernetic implants and trained to kill by the government. 
 
The oldest, Triela, pursues her targets with a ferocious enthusiasm, unwilling to settle for less than total annihilation. Her mirror in this bloody stalemate is Pinocchio, a shell of a boy raised as an assassin by the FRF: a terrorist faction at war with the SWA. Cold and cruelly efficient, he wields sharpened steel as though it were an extension of his own hand. 
 
Once human, these shattered souls have become murderous machines with only vague recollections of what it meant to be real — and a brutal compulsion to be the last killer standing. 
 
(Source: Funimation)

In December 2007, she changed her name from Yukako Yoshikawa (吉川 友佳子) to Anri Shiono.

Officially, the Social Welfare Agency is a government sponsored corporation that's in the business of saving lives. In reality, it's an agency on the fringe of technology. They give terminal patients another shot at life using cybernetic implants. This conditioning process then shapes the patient into an efficient machine for handling all of the government's dirty work. 
 
(Source: Funimation)

[Twitter](https://twitter.com/Kanako01101978)

The Social Welfare Agency in Italy is not what it seems. Yes, it rescues young girls who have been brutalized, but it then brainwashes them and turns them into ruthless killers for an elite and secret counter-terrorism unit for the Italian government. 
Enter a young girl named Henrietta. After witnessing the savage murder of her family and barely surviving, the Agency takes her in and repairs her injuries using the latest in cybernetic technology. All traces of Henrietta's past are wiped from her mind, as she becomes one of the Agency's most lethal assassins. 
(Source: Seven Seas Entertainment)

Episodes 14 and 15 of Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino.