World
Archbishop apologises as links to ‘child abuser’ emerge
London: The Archbishop of Canterbury has issued an “unreserved and unequivocal” apology on behalf of the Church of England for not reporting a child abuser in the 1970s, a media report said.Archbishop Reverend Justin Welby on Wednesday said the Church had “failed terribly” by not reporting John Smyth QC to the police. He apologised after admitting that he had worked at the holiday camps where teenage boys were groomed for abuse, the Telegraph reported.Smyth, the head of a Christian charity that ran the summer camps, was accused of carrying out a string of “horrific” sado-masochistic attacks in the late 1970s.
The report also said that the Channel 4 News will on Thursday broadcast allegations of Smyth’s use of the camps.The boys from some of Britain’s leading public schools attended these camps. Smyth used them to gain access to teenagers, whom he forced to strip naked before subjecting them to savage beatings.In a statement issued on Wednesday, the Archbishop said that he had been friends with Smyth, a barrister, during that period, when he worked as a dormitory officer at the camps, run by the Iwerne TrustWelby had kept in “occasional” contact with the barrister since, the report said.
The Archbishop though says that he was made aware of the allegations against Smyth in 2013 when police eventually became involved.Smyth a Queen’s Counsel (QC), who acted for Mary Whitehouse, the public morals campaigner, in some of her most-high profile court cases, is accused of recruiting 22 young men into a cult.The cult agreed to let Smyth administer tens of thousands of lashes with a garden cane, supposedly to purge them of minor sins such as masturbation and pride.
The beatings, which took place in a shed in the garden of Smyth’s Winchester home, were so intense that the victims were left with lasting scars.Details of the alleged abuse did not come to light until 1982, when one boy attempted suicide after being ordered to submit himself to another beating.The Iwerne Trust commissioned a report which concluded: “The scale and severity of the practice was horrific.” But Smyth was never reported to cops, the Sun said in its report.He was instead allowed to move to South Africa after agreeing never to work with children again.
The Archbishop’s statement said: “John Smyth was one of the main leaders at the camp and although the Archbishop worked with him, he was not part of the inner circle of friends; no one discussed allegations of abuse by John Smyth with him.””The Archbishop left England to work in Paris for an oil company in 1978, where he remained for five years. The Archbishop knew Smyth had moved overseas but, apart from the occasional card, did not maintain contact with him,” it said.”We recognise that many institutions fail catastrophically, but the Church is meant to hold itself to a far, far higher standard and we have failed terribly,” Welby’s statement said.”For that the Archbishop apologises unequivocally and unreservedly to all survivors.”
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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