We’ll try to return Christian girl to family, says foster row council

A COUNCIL accused of forcing a Christian five-year-old to live with a Muslim foster carer said yesterday it would try to return the girl to her family.

Tower Hamlets council in East London said it was ‘working towards’ allowing the child to live with a relative, following outrage over its decision to place her in two Muslim households in the past six months against the wishes of her family.

The girl’s parents were said to have pleaded with the council to allow the child to live with friends or relatives, but officials opposed the family’s plans to place her into the temporary care of her grandmother.

Instead social workers noted the Britishborn child’s distress as she begged not to be returned to a Muslim foster home where she said she could not understand her carers as they did not speak English. Friends of the child’s family said she speaks English as her first language, has a UK passport and has been christened.

But during an access visit she was said to have told her mother that ‘Christmas and Easter are stupid’ and ‘European women are stupid and alcoholic’, prompting questions over cultural attitudes expressed in at least one of her foster homes.

The Children’s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, said she had raised concerns with Tower Hamlets.

Confidential reports seen by The Times newspaper described the five-year-old sobbing and begging not to go back to one foster mother who wore a headscarf and face veil in public.

The girl claimed the foster carer had taken away her necklace, which had a Christian cross on it, and suggested she should learn Arabic. She was left in that placement for four months before being handed to her current foster mother, who reportedly wears a burka in public to cover her face.

Sources at Tower Hamlets said the placement was temporary and refused to say why it took the child into care. It said: ‘The child is fostered by an English-speaking family of mixed race in this temporary placement.

‘We would like to give more details but we are legally restricted. We have always been working towards the child being looked after by a family member and we continue to do so.’