The adviser who said ignoring a child’s culture is ‘terrible crime’
A FOSTERING adviser at Tower Hamlets Council once claimed it was ‘a terrible crime’ to ignore the culture and background of a child in care, it can be revealed.
Liz Sibthorpe, who sits as an independent member on the council’s fostering panel, issued the warning when recounting her own difficulties as a girl of mixedrace heritage who was placed with a white adoptive mother.
The fostering panel’s main function is to decide on the suitability of applicants to foster children, and review the performance of recently-approved carers.
Miss Sibthorpe has considerable expertise in fostering and adoption, informed in part by her own background. Her council biography says she ‘was adopted in a transracial placement as a baby’.
The 68-year- old author has spoken openly about the strains she felt after being placed with a white adoptive mother from the age of 12 months. ‘From a very young age I knew I wasn’t fully English. The difficulty for me was that [my adoptive mother] wanted me to be white’, she said in an interview with the York Press 2006. ‘She would say, “Don’t go for an interview in the summer because you look coloured”. It made me feel that being of mixed race was bad. But I wasn’t ashamed of my colour and wanted to know who I was.
‘In my experience, our background and cultures were denied to us. It’s a terrible crime to do to a child.’
The same year, she wrote how she ‘grew up feeling embarrassed... but I didn’t know where else I belonged’.
The fact that one of its panel members has made such clear comments on the issue will add to questions over the state of children’s services in Tower Hamlets.
Last night, Miss Sibthorpe told the Daily Mail: ‘I do believe the department does its very best to care for children and that is all I can say. I have no idea when this happened or how it was dealt with. I was adopted 60-odd years ago and things are very different now.’
The job of fostering panels is to ‘oversee the conduct of assessments’ and ‘give advice and make recommendations’. They do not, however, decide on where to place a child.