A court has ruled that a Christian child who was placed in the foster care of two Muslim households should now move in with her grandmother. At a family court hearing last week, a judge said that the girl should live with a member of her family who could meet her needs “in terms of ethnicity, culture and religion”, the Times reported. The judge also ordered Tower Hamlets to conduct an investigation into issues raised by the newspaper’s reporting of the case. According to the Times, the five-year-old girl, who speaks English as her first language, has been cared for by two Muslim families in the past six months. The child had allegedly been “very distressed” by one family telling her to remove her crucifix necklace, and preventing her from eating a carbonara meal because it contained bacon. She was also reportedly encouraged to learn Arabic and was begging not to go back to the family because “they do not speak English”. Tower Hamlets council released a statement in which it said there had been inaccuracies about the case included in the Times’s reports. “While we cannot go into details of a case that would identify a child in foster care, there are inaccuracies in the reporting of it,” a spokes-man said. “For example, the child is in fact 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 to do so. “We have always been working towards the child being looked after by a family member and we continue to do so.”
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Ruling on Christian child fostered by Muslims
The Catholic Herald

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