The decision to take a child into care is never easy. Both the child and its natural parents will normally feel a great loss, and these feelings must be respected even if the alternative appears to be even worse. But the sundering of such a fundamental relationship will stir up strong feelings in onlookers too. The reports of a case in Tower Hamlets, where a white, Christian child is reported to have been put into the care of culturally insensitive Muslim foster parents, has awoken variously atavistic responses. The most helpful is the decision of the children’s commissioner, Anne Longfield, to look into the case.

At the moment we know very little beyond newspaper reports which are necessarily based on third-party accounts of what a distressed five-year-old child has said. We do not know any other sides of the story, and it’s not clear that more publicity would serve the interests of the child at the heart of this. Family courts deliberate in private for very good reasons.

What’s needed is a thorough and impartial investigation of the circumstances of this particular case. The history of Tower Hamlets council does not inspire confidence, but this is not the moment for a rush to judgment. As history shows, all the way from the medieval legend of Hugh of Lincoln, a Christian boy whom Jews were said to have murdered, to the satanic panics of the 1980s and 1990s, the belief that a religious minority is mistreating children of the majority can inspire moral panics at best and pogroms at worst.

In the meantime, it is worth getting the wider points of principle clear. The most important is that race, culture, and religion are all factors that must be considered in fostering, but none should be decisive. The system should not be colour-blind, but neither should it be dazzled. This is clear in the current guidelines and it has been learned from bitter experience. Black children tend to be overrepresented in the care system, and more carers are white. However, in minority majority areas, like Tower Hamlets, where only 31% of the population is white, the position may be reversed.

In 2010, agencies tended to put children only with parents of the same ethnicity, meaning that the wait for black and Asian children was three times as long as for white children. The Children and Families Act 2014 put an end to this practice. Children in the care system have benefited. In fact, the present system depends on children being adopted across racial and religious boundaries.

One of the disturbing features of the current furore is the distinctly racist undertone seen when black or Muslim parents foster white children, often in newspapers which fawn on white celebrities who adopt black children. Angelina Jolie and Madonna, for instance, have been lauded for their charity. But only in June, a Sikh couple were denied the chance to adopt a child over their “cultural heritage” by Windsor and Maidenhead council’s agency. They were told that only white children were in need, so they could not put their names down as potential adopters.

If the allegations in the reports are true, the foster parents involved should not have been allowed to look after the child. But even if they are proved, a lack of sympathy or cultural sensitivity are not exclusive to any one religion or ethnicity.