counter response to the Tom Pride article about ‘How the press lied about the little girl staying with Muslim foster parents. Here are the facts.”

 This is a counter response to the Tom Pride article here about ‘How the press lied about the little girl staying with Muslim foster parents. Here are the facts.” it has been widely shared online and needs countering as does not fully reflect the facts.
 
This is based on the actual facts as known and reported publicly not a selective selection. I am a Councillor in Tower Hamlets. Part of the difficulty with this story is the paramount need to protect the child from further harm so it is possible we may never know exactly what happened as we cannot reveal all details.
 
But I am concerned that Tom’s article is part of an attempt to de-legitimise the press and to paint this story as purely Islamophobia. It is not, it is a serious issue and needs to be properly reported as the paramount aim of children’s services is to protect the child.
 
It appears as if Tom Pride did not read the original reports published by Andrew Norfolk in The Times newspaper (they are behind a paywall) which renders his analysis incomplete. Other newspapers simply read The Times reports and copied them. The issue Tom should be raising is why if any discrepancies exist between the original report and the copies.
 
Andrew Norfolk, Chief Investigative Reporter of The Times is an award winning journalist who helped to uncover the Rotherham sex abuse scandal where for years local authorities, the Police and other bodies ignored what was happening in part it is believed on the grounds of political correctness. He was right to uncover that scandal and I believe based on what is known so far to publish this story as well. It is in the public interest.
 
The reports mention that he had access to internal Tower Hamlets Council reports provided to him by an employee of the Council. They appear to include contact centre reports written by an employee of the Council who was supervising meetings between the child and her birth mother in a secure contact centre. The supervisor would be able to hear the conversation as part of their role is to ensure that the mother for example cannot coach the child nor find information she is not entitled to like the location of the foster family.
 
Therefore much of the information published was originally written by employees of the Council and is therefore known to them.
 
I have only compared his ten alleged falsehoods to the original The Times reports, the BBC R4 Today programme on Saturday 2nd September and the court documents, all except the BBC programme were available when Tom wrote his piece. In red are the points Tom made, below each one is my response, in Italics are excerpts from other reports.
 
1) According to court documents, it was the police not the local authority (as stated by the tabloids) who decided the child should be put into foster care:
 
Irrelevant to the story about the choice of foster parents. The Times just says that the foster placement decisions were made by Tower Hamlets Council which is correct. They made no comment about who made the original decision that the child should be placed in foster care.
 
The foster placements were made, against the wishes of the girl’s family, by the scandal-ridden borough of Tower Hamlets.
 
2) According to court documents, the foster family criticised by the tabloids was a temporary placement.
 
The Times made no specific comments on the length of fostering except to say that it had started this year. Foster placements by their very nature are temporary (even if they may extend for years) which is why we have adoption as a permanent solution.
 
To protect the child, The Times has chosen not to identify her or the unusual circumstances that led to her being taken into care earlier this year.
 
3) According to court documents, the child herself is from Muslim heritage and her Muslim grandmother has now been cleared by the courts to look after her. This fact is only disputed by the girl’s mother but none of this was mentioned by the tabloids as it would obviously totally destroy their narrative:
 
Islam is a religion not a heritage.
 
The court document says
Documents including the assessment of the maternal grandparents state that they are of a Muslim background but are non practising. The child’s mother says they are of Christian heritage. 
 
The child is described in the reports as white Christian English speaking five year old girl who wears a cross and has long blond hair (as per the photo from The Times). One set of grandparents may have a Muslim background but were not practising so technically are not Muslim. In our society it is not uncommon for mixed families to be very different from each other. A good example is Boris Johnson, white, British Christian but with a Turkish grandparent.
 
As a reminder this is what the regulations say about foster placements (the United Nations - Convention on the Rights of the Child 1990 has similar wording)
 
(b) before making any decision affecting a child placed or to be placed with a foster parent
due consideration is given to the child’s--
(i) wishes and feelings (having regard to the child’s age and understanding), and
(ii) religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background.
 
Her religious persuasion was Christian. The law says nothing about matching based on family history and only one set of grandparents are of Muslim background.
 
The foster parents did not appear to match based on religion, race, possibly home culture (eating on the floor) and possibly linguistics in the home environment. That is not to say that the foster parents were not good or loving foster parents but the law is clear on placements.
 
4) The temporary foster mother did not wear a veil as stated by the tabloids. She wears a hijab:
 
The veil in the photographs published by the Mail and other comics was photoshopped onto a stock picture of a Muslim family taking a walk in a park in Dubai:
 
The Daily Mail did say that the photo was posed by models, they later used the same picture as in The Times which was real.
 
The Times actually said this
 
Her first carer, with whom the girl lived for four months, is believed to have worn a niqab outside the family home. The carer at her present foster placement wears a burka, fully concealing her face, when she accompanies the child in public.
 
A burka and a niqab are different from a hijab, I do not know where Tom got the Hijab comment from.
 
But The Times have pictures of at least one foster carer so would have been able to visually confirm what the carer was wearing (the pictures published are from the back and pixelated)
 
5) According to court documents, the child’s mother has not at any time requested the foster parents be changed:
 
True but the court documents also say this
 
8. The mother raised some concerns about the appropriateness of the placement. On 27th June 2017, the court directed the Local Authority to produce a statement to address the cultural appropriateness of the foster care placement. 
 
11.The mother has today confirmed further concerns in respect of the foster carers. 
 
12.The mother applied for the child to be placed in the care of the maternal grandmother at the hearing on 27th June 2017. 
 
So the mother was trying to replace the foster parents with the child’s grandmother, the best possible carer under the circumstances
 
6) Tower Hamlets council have confirmed that the temporary foster parents do speak English. According to court documents, the Family Court dealing with the case has also expressed no concerns about the foster parents’ level of English. The press simply lied about that:
 
This is what the The Times said
 
In confidential local authority reports seen by The Times, a social services supervisor describes the child sobbing and begging not to be returned to the foster carer’s home because “they don’t speak English”.
 
and
 
A social services supervisor for Tower Hamlets in east London described the child sobbing and begging not to be returned to the foster family because “she doesn’t understand the Arabic”. The girl is also understood to have said that she was regularly expected to eat meals on the floor.
 
I believe that what a child says in the presence of a social services supervisor should be listened to and investigated (the mother would have had no opportunity to coach the child). The question is not that the foster parents could not speak English the question is what was the routine language used at home.

The Court says nothing about the language or otherwise of the foster parent(s)
 

7) According to council foster care officials, the temporary foster parents did not ban Easter as stated by the tabloids. There is also no mention of this according to court documents by either the mother herself or the lawyers representing her. The press simply lied about that.
 
This is what The Times report said
 
More recently, the girl is said to have told her mother that “Christmas and Easter are stupid” and that “European women are stupid and alcoholic”.
 
I do not know where Tom got the comment that the parents had banned Easter
 
8) There is no evidence, apart from claims by the tabloid press, that the temporary foster parents have banned crucifixes and bacon from the home. There is also no mention of this according to court documents by either the mother herself or the lawyers representing her. The press simply lied.
 
This is what the The Times said
 
The reports state that the supervisor heard the girl, who at times was “very distressed”, claiming that the foster carer removed her necklace, which had a Christian cross, and also suggested that she should learn Arabic.
 
and
 
A council employee heard the child say that the first foster parent, to whose care she was due to have been returned this week, had taken away her necklace, which had a cross. 
 
and
 
It is understood that the child told her mother that when she was given her favourite Italian food to take home, the foster carer would not allow her to eat it because the carbonara meal contained bacon.
 
9) According to court documents, it seems the child was put into temporary foster care by the police because of the mother’s alcohol and drugs problems. There was no mention of this fact by the tabloid press, presumably as it would put a question mark over the mother’s credibility and her criticism of the temporary foster parents.
 
Irrelevant to the question, was the child placed with the appropriate foster parent as required by the law or not?
 
As a reminder The Times said this
 
To protect the child, The Times has chosen not to identify her or the unusual circumstances that led to her being taken into care earlier this year.
 
10) The foster parents have been rated very highly by independent assessors, including the child’s own independent Children’s Guardian whose job is to advocate solely for the welfare of the child:
 
There is no mention of the word ‘rated’ or ‘highly’ in the Court report not sure where Tom got that. This is what the Court said
 
The child’s Guardian has undertaken enquiries and visited the child in the current foster carer’s home and spoken to the child alone. The Guardian has no concerns as to the child’s welfare and she reports that the child is settled and well cared for by the foster carer 
 
It is not clear which foster family the Guardian visited as there were two families at different times. The Times makes clear that one family was more of a concern.
 
Tom also makes no mention of the relevant fact that in April 2017 OFSTED failed Tower Hamlets Children’s Services with these comments  (the childs fostering started in March)
 
“There are widespread and serious failures in the services provided to children who need help and protection in Tower Hamlets. As a result, too many children remain in situations of actual or potential harm for too long. Insufficient scrutiny by the chief executive, the director of children’s services (DCS) and politicians has meant that they did not know about the extent of the failures to protect children until this inspection.” 

The full report can be accessed here worth reading the first two pages.

I will be trying to confirm the accuracy of the original Times reports but we owe that little girl and other children not yet fostered the benefit of an investigation to ensure that all children in the future are fostered by the best possible foster carers who will minimise the inevitable trauma of fostering.