The whiplash effect of successive revelations in the Tower Hamlets fostering case has been astonishing. The publication of the court’s judgment makes it clear that all of the details which gave the original story its racist and xenophobic power were false. One thing the case shows clearly is the monstrous power of the tabloid press to cut and crush the complexities of private lives till they fit into stereotypes. The mother in this case is, we now know, a woman with drug and alcohol problems, a police record and two children who are the subject of separate court proceedings. No father has been traced. She is herself the child of Muslim immigrants. An editor’s whim, no more, picked her for the role of Martyred English Rose; a different whim would have made her into a Terrible Example. Either would just as well have gratified the readers’ angry prurience.

This is a case that will cause deserved and lasting damage to the reputations of both the reporter and the newspaper which placed the original version on the front page. It will also have damaged community relations in this country. The child herself can’t have gained anything from the publicity, even if the harm directly caused to her can’t be compared to the harm which led to her being taken into care. Muslim children whose potential Muslim foster parents look at this mess and resolve to have nothing to do with the business will certainly suffer. That is a tragedy.

Prejudice is also obvious in the treatment of comparable cases of cross-cultural fostering. It goes almost without saying that no mass-market newspaper has campaigned against the care of black children in white families, but there have also been several cases in which children of eastern European families have been removed by the courts here and placed in the care of British foster families; some of these caused outrage in their native lands and even led to diplomatic pressure to try and restore the children to their cultural heritage. They were not widely reported in the British press, even on slow news days.

The only defence of the original report is that the full facts were not available to the reporter. It’s just not good enough. Any trainee journalist is taught that to write only one side of a complicated dispute is almost certainly unfair. But there is a suspicion in cases involving family law that the silence of the authorities conceals their own inadequacies as much as it protects the children involved. Although the media already have access to the family courts, our freedom to report from them is closely circumscribed.

Sir James Munby, the most senior judge concerned with family matters, has been working for years to increase the transparency of the system, against the resistance of much of his own profession. This dreadful case might, paradoxically, strengthen his argument. Although the natural reaction might be to claim that less should have been written about this case, this is wrong. What destroyed the credibility of the original report was not suppression, but the publication of more evidence. Children can have their anonymity protected by measures much less draconian than those currently in place and their interests would be better protected by more openness. This would in turn increase the public trust in courts, and in the system.