This story came out at Jihad Watch a few weeks ago now, but it should not pass without a comment here at W4. In the United Kingdom--an ostensibly free even if not ostensibly Christian country--a teenager who converted to Christianity was ordered by social workers not to attend any church activity for six months. The social workers fired her foster mother because the girl had been baptized, at her own insistence, without previously undergoing "counseling to ensure that she understood the implications, especially as such conversions are dealt with harshly in some Muslim countries."
In other words, in the United Kingdom, social workers attempt to manipulate and discourage Christian converts and to uphold as far as they are able the Muslim prohibition against conversion to Christianity.
Worse, after the foster mother was fired (for allowing a teenager in her care to become a Christian), the young lady was returned to "members of her family," who have "not been told of her conversion." It is unclear which members of her family she has been sent to live with. She was originally placed in foster care because her father beat her repeatedly and threatened to take her to Pakistan and force her into a marriage there. Given the extreme clannishness of Muslim families, for her to have to live with any members of her family following her conversion could be quite dangerous for her. The foster mother said, of the girl's decision to be baptized, "I couldn’t have stopped her if I had wanted to. She saw the baptism as a washing away of the horrible things she had been through and a symbol of a new start."
At sixteen, teens in Britain are apparently allowed considerable latitude as to where and how they will live their lives. Contrast the control-freakish behavior of social services concerning a Muslim girl's conversion to Christianity with this story of a young girl who suddenly left home to live with her adult school teacher. The social worker showed up at her parents' house only to tell the girl's mother that she had "explained her rights" to the daughter and to take the daughter's clothes to the adult teacher's house.
In any event, the now-17-year-old Christian convert (whose name is not being released) certainly needs our prayers.
Comments (6)
At a certain point, one simply loses the capacity for astonishment.
Thanks, Lydia - I had missed this story.
Posted by steve burton | February 22, 2009 9:08 PM
That poor girl indeed needs prayer. May God be glorified in her as she faces another difficult -- perhaps terrifying and worse -- situation -- but *with Him* now. Lord, give her strength and courage in Your love for her.
Posted by Beth Impson | February 22, 2009 10:01 PM
I would love to be the chairman of the committee that investigates the social service employee and supervisors who acted on this case (especially if the girl comes to more harm).
I would love to immerse myself in the study of the kind of quiet evil that occurs in the people and process which allows them to indulge themselves in this sort of insanity and surrealness, their personality disorders and perverted thinking that makes these people with their little "brief authority" who make themselves temporary gods.
I would, of course, like to expose these monsters of bureaucracy and arrogance.
Of course, Mark Steyn exposed the Canadian Human Rights Commissions but it doesn't do any good. Still, I would to look these b**tards in the face and tell them what they are.
Posted by mark butterworth | February 23, 2009 12:50 AM
Nobody has the rights to stop anybody to chose what religion they want to follow. She is 17 and I think she is old enough to make up her own mind not by being forced agasin't her own free will. what kind of monsters do they have working for social services?
Posted by Teresa wright | March 23, 2009 3:38 PM
If a similiar situation had happened in a muslim country, for example, a christian 17 yr old girl converting to Islam and running away from home to stay with a stranger on his enticement, I think, the western media would have been up in arms against that particular muslim country. They would have said that a minor has been brain washed and made to run away to a stranger who is sexually abusing the child. It is a sorry state of affairs.
Posted by Faisal | September 4, 2009 3:18 PM
Mr. Faisal apparently doesn't even know what thread he's posting in. The girl in this story didn't "run away from home." You are obviously thinking of the Rifqa Bary story. Not that I'm interested in discussing that with someone of Faisal's bias anyway.
Oh, btw, Rifqa is in the custody of the State of Florida and is living with an entirely different family from the family to whom she ran. She wants to stay in this foster home, assigned to her by the State of Florida, until she turns 18. And there was not and a fortiori is not now any slightest question of a sexual relationship in the entire matter. That is just your bizarre mind, sir.
Posted by Lydia | September 4, 2009 3:52 PM