Pope’s call to save kids from porn
POPE Francis has demanded better protection for children amid the explosion of internet porn.
The pontiff spoke out as the Vatican confront their own cross-border child porn investigation involving a top papal envoy.
Francis was yesterday at a conference on fighting child porn and protecting children in the digital age.
He backed delegates’ proposals to toughen sanctions against those who abuse and exploit children online and improve filters to prevent young people from accessing porn online.
Francis said the Catholic Church knew well the “grave error” of trying to conceal the problem of sexual abuse.
He said an international, cross-disciplinary approach was needed to protect children from the dark web and the “corruption of their minds and violence against their bodies”. The exhibition The Black Minstrelsy in Scotland is on at the Museum of Edinburgh. It forms part of Scotland’s Black History Month and will explore a shameful chapter in our history. Many of the images and materials are shocking but they are an important document of the nation’s relationship with racism and the racial myths and stereotypes that exist today. The exhibition uses images from Dr Eric Graham’s essay, The Black Minstrelsy in Scotland. Here, he looks at country’s history of Black Minstrelsy. IT IS not so long ago the TV institution that was the “George Mitchell’s Black and White Minstrel Show” commanded audiences of 21million. Although it was cancelled in 1978, after 20 years, a touring version continued until 1987. But what is less well-known is that the precursor to the TV incarnation began in the 19th century with the Black Minstrelsy shows. In June 1839, the “Father of American Minstrels”, Thomas “Daddy” Rice, made his first appearance on the stage of the Adelphi Theatre in Edinburgh. Rice, a white comic actor from New York, had arrived in Britain in 1835 and became an overnight sensation in London, capturing the imagination of the city’s upper classes and visiting nobility. “Black faced” with burnt cork and oil, dressed in rags and with his toes sticking out of old boots, his manic buffoonery centred around his signature tune “Jump Jim Crow”. Jim Crow being a derogatory term for a Negro. The core of Rice’s caricature of the American plantation Negro was that of a lazy and barely literate simpleton. What his audiences found hilariously funny in his character was the uninhibited wild gesturing, rolling eyes and ever cheerful acceptance of his uncomplicated lower lot in life – so long as he had a “yaller gal” to moon over. The caricature played to the latent prejudices of his white audiences. This specific model of racial typecasting was an American import but there were deep-rooted parallels in Scotland. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher and historian, had concluded that the Negro was an inferior race of limited intellect and unable to fully integrate into white society. Scotland, too, had made fortunes in the slave trade. Rice left behind an indelible set of stereotypes that were to be copied by successive generations of