In their fervor to smear Christians by any means necessary, the BBC doesn't mind throwing the rules of ethical journalism out the window.

Today, I stumbled onto a classic example from this summer: an African girl is found abused, covered with cuts and bruises. Who did this to her?

Abuse case sparks new fears

She was found covered in cuts and bruises on the steps to her block of flats in Hackney, East London, one cold November morning.

The street warden who spotted her while patrolling the Woodberry Down estate said she seemed "freezing cold and terrified."

The shocking story she told revealed a litany of abuse by her own relatives - all committed Christians - apparently in the name of religion.

They believed the girl was a witch possessed by evil spirits, and thought beating her would help drive out the demons.

Ah, the girl was abused by Christians! And thus, her abuse "sparks fear" of these strange and evil people in our midst.

Yet millions of children are abused in Britian each year -- and each is truly a tragedy, but this case makes BBC headlines not because her case is the worst, but because ... the abusers are Christians.

Only, um, they aren't. Not in the slightest:

An expert in African religion, Dr Richard Hoskins of King's College, London, who advises the Metropolitan Police on religiously-motivated crime, gave evidence at the trial.

He says belief in 'ndoki' - the word for witchcraft - is widespread in West Africa and among some immigrant communities in London, fuelled by a massive growth in small fundamentalist Christian churches.

The abusers in this case - who worshipped at such a church in Hackney - may have believed they were carrying out a form of exorcism, driving out evil spirits.

Apparently, "Ndoki" is a word meaning "sorcerer" in the African dialect of Lingala; apparently, as the expert testified, this cult is a reaction against the spread of Christianity in Africa; it's underlying precepts are probably more palatable to the average BBC reporter than Christian ones. But this is apparently all instantly transmogrified into "Christianity" if the BBC can wring allegation of child abuse by Christians from it.

"The headline giveth, the fine print taketh away." (Hesitations 4:7, KJV)

Um... wasn't lying unethical once?

The BBC Covers Up Religiously-Motivated Abuse

Worse, the BBC has no interest in exploring actual connections between religion and abuse. The problem of forced marriages in the British Hindu and Islamic communities leads to some rather tragic situations. Yet you will be hard-pressed to find such stories in the BBC's pages.

For example, a BBC News search on "Islam abuse" and you'll find page after page of stories claiming the US (and sometimes the British public) is abusing Muslims. In short: Muslim = abused. Now do a search on "christian abuse" and you'll all kinds of stories alleging abuse by Christians. Again, in short, at the BBC: Christian = abuser.

And strangely, "christian abuse" is the phrase which finally turns up a story on forced marriages. Reading it, we discover why the search linked this problem with Christianity, not Sikhism, Islam or Hinduism: because the article tiptoes around the identity, religion, and motivations of the abusers. The reader learns (absurdly) that Catholics force their children into arranged marriages just as often as Muslims or Hindus:

Mr Talwar says victims of the practice are victims of domestic abuse - a phenomena which effects women from all races, creeds and religions.

In Britain, Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi communities are particularly heavily hit, but it could just as easily be someone from a Christian Catholic background...

Mr Talwar gives the example of a Christian who marries a child off because they are disabled or because they fear they are gay and believe a forced marriage will make them "normal".

So in the BBC article on forced marriages, the only religion to be explicitly linked to the practice of forced marrage, by name, is ... you guessed it ... Christianity. Christians, we learn from the BBC, force disabled or feared-gay children to marry strangers. I'm sure the books are brimming with such cases.

Bias? What bias?

Makes you wonder what, exactly, it is about Christianity which makes them go to such strange extremes to oppose it.