But when Kony 2012 - a film calling for the capture of African warlord Joseph Kony - was shown to youngsters in northern Uganda, the overwhelming reaction was outrage.

The audience in Lira - where Kony's army has killed, raped and abducted children for two decades - hurled rocks and complained that the footage did not accurately reflect their lives.

Academics have also criticised it for being patronising and giving the misleading impression that the rebel chief - who leads The Lord's Resistance Army - is still active in northern Uganda. In fact, it was pushed out in 2006, and has been operating in the neighbouring states of South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.

As someone who has worked in northern Uganda, gathering stories from conflict survivors, I understand the critics' point perfectly. By glorifying the aid-givers and largely relegating the Ugandans as bystanders in their own story, Kony 2012 resurrects the spectre of the white man parachuting in to 'save' Africa.

But for all its ham-fistedness, I believe the film that has spread faster than any other online video to date and is due to have a sequel released this week, is overall a positive thing.

Not only has it raised awareness of the crisis among an audience of tens of millions, but it could also provide a prototype for other charities that want to harness the power of the Internet to tap into a fired-up young demographic.

That’s because, although we hate to admit it, there’s a big fat ‘I’ at the heart of activism. Being an activist makes you feel good about yourself and buzz with the euphoria of being a hero. For a charity appeal film to strike a chord with the masses, the mission must also feel urgent and achievable. Too often, otherwise compassionate people are turned off from engaging in issues affecting the developing world because the problems seem so complex and tangled.

In an era of Facebook and Twitter, where patience is scarce and individualism reigns supreme, this is what Kony 2012 has smashed through so successfully. The 30-minute clip is narrated by 33-year-old Jason Russell - co-founder of Invisible Children - and focuses on his personal mission to bring Kony to justice.

Viewers are urged to 'shape history' by getting a kit with wristbands and posters. The aim is to "make him famous" and ensure that the United States - which sent 100 military advisers to help hunt the warlord last October - cannot quietly drop the mission.

Last week, amid mounting criticism of the film, the African Union announced that it would deploy 5,000 troops to help the US troops in their mission. Although Francisco Madeira, the Union's special envoy, denied that the move was prompted by the Kony 2012 film, it's difficult to imagine that the powerful yet controversial campaign had no influence at all.

After all, Kony and his troops have been terrorising villagers in the Central African region for more than two decades but this is the first time that such an intense spotlight has been thrown upon their atrocities.

Capturing Kony is a noble and pressing cause. His group has abducted more than 30,000 children in Uganda and continues to massacre innocent civilians in neighbouring countries.

But my contact in the region told me the film was "not going down very well locally" and sent a statement from an inter-faith community group lambasting the clip's "sensational messages".

The irony is it that may have been precisely these elements which allowed Kony 2012 to leapfrog the usual staid and dusty NGO channels and mine the rich seam of dumbed-down Western youth culture.

Testimonies

Back in 2010, I was in northern Uganda as part of a team gathering testimonies from children who lost parents or siblings to the conflict. Their stories were featured in a DVD educating British pupils while encouraging them to fund-raise. The four films were told sensitively, through the voices of the Ugandan children and gave an accurate picture of the conflict.

How many YouTube hits did they get? Less than 1,000 between them. This illustrates how Kony 2012 has eclipsed other attempts by charities to harness social media.

Its meteoric rise has floored even its makers. A few weeks after the film became an internet sensation, Mr Russell was hospitalised after San Diego police found him naked and making sexual gestures in public. His wife said he is suffering from brief reactive psychosis caused by the clip's global attention. The sad episode is yet another example of how things take on a life of their own once launched into cyberspace.

Yet this flawed but well-meaning film has provided the first step towards opening up a new arena for activists seeking to reach a mass audience online.  I hope the soon-to-be released Kony 2012 Part 2 will correct some of the more jarring aspects of the original – namely, the lack of historical facts and recognition of local people’s efforts to rehabilitate their communities.

Other charities say they can and should learn lessons from the campaign about how to attract a huge following so quickly. For example, Invisible Children is said to have tapped its established network of supporters on American campuses, which helped the film go viral.

I'd like to think that in future, the message could be made a little more sophisticated without diluting its appeal.

Insensitive? Yes, but Kony 2012 remains a force for good.

Now, with the death toll at more than 25 million and counting, there are glimmers of hope that the spread of the disease could be stopped in its tracks.

Thanks to decades of tireless awareness-raising and scientific research, there is a real chance that there could be no new cases of HIV -  the virus that causes Aids - by 2020, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said at a conference this summer.

He added that if world leaders and agencies unite “as never before”, the goal of relegating Aids to the history books could be met.

But there is one major stumbling block to this vision of an Aids-free world.

That is, the deep-rooted fear which still surrounds this most misunderstood of illnesses. This fear has turned many sufferers into social pariahs and deterred others from coming forward to be treated, which further fuels the spread of the disease.

Today, on World Aids day, as we take stock of how far humanity has come in the fight against the disease, one thing seems clear: Aids is capable of bringing out the best and the worst in people.

From the playgrounds of rural Scotland to the lime-green fields of Northern Uganda, I have interviewed sufferers who say the stigma associated with being HIV-positive is one of the hardest things to bear.

Five years ago, I spoke to Sarah, a 20-year-old woman in Scotland who contracted the virus in the womb after her mother received a contaminated blood transfusion.

Born in the mid-1980s, Sarah (not her real name) was one of the first children in Scotland to be diagnosed HIV-positive and was bullied mercilessly at school.

“I've had to put up with being called 'dirty' and a 'junkie'. And most of the time my family and I were treated like lepers,” she told me.

She added that her schoolmates’ parents, presumably ignorant of the fact that HIV is transmitted via unprotected sex and direct blood contact, also told their children to avoid standing near her when she coughed or using the same toilet seat as her.

“The truth is that I was more likely to become hospitalised if one of them coughed on me,” she said, referring to the fact that HIV suffers are often left with weak immune systems.

Half a world away in war-scarred Northern Uganda, I met Florence, a 34-year-old mother of four.

Even though she was receiving anti-retroviral medication when I met her last year, Florence (not her real name) was visibly very weaker and worsening by the day.

The drugs, which have helped many sufferers add decades to their lives, were not working effectively on her, largely because she had received them too late.

The reason for the delay? Her husband, who started to fall ill repeatedly after being unfaithful to her, had refused to get an HIV test.

“Even when he was very weak and dying, he did not want to go for testing and he did not want me to go either,” she said. “He feared being told he was HIV-positive.”

In a male-dominated society, it was difficult for Florence to go against her husband’s wishes or even refuse to have unprotected sex with him.

It was only after he died that Florence was free to go for the test. Not only did she discover that she had the disease but she also was told her CD4 count, which measured the health of her body’s immune system, was very low. This meant the HIV virus was now at an advanced stage.

“Now I just worry for my children,” she said. “Who will look after them? How will they go to school? Where will they live?”

Florence’s predicament is not unique. Countless others like her have been infected because their partners refused to go for the HIV test for fear of what others would say.

Only half of those with the virus know their status. And there is still great fear attached to taking the test, The Guardian newspaper reported in May.

This conspiracy of silence fuels new cases of HIV, thwarting efforts to stop the virus’s spread.

The good news is that anti-retroviral drugs and therapy, which significantly prolong the lives of people who are HIV-positive and reduce the rate of mother-to-child transmission, are available and reaching more and more sufferers.

According to this year’s UNAIDs progress report, increased access to HIV services has resulted in a 15 per cent reduction of new infections over the past decade and a 22 per cent decline in Aids-related deaths in the last five years.

But in this tough economic climate, with international donor funding for HIV/Aids programmes dropping from US$8.7 billion (S$11.15 billion) to US$7.6 billion last year, progress on that front could be jeopardised.

It is clear that we cannot rely on scientific breakthroughs alone or take for granted the steady stream of funding which has supported it.

Instead, individuals, communities and governments need to engage in practices that help lift the cloud of ignorance and fear that still surround this preventable disease. Otherwise, too many victims will continue to suffer in silence.

Some of the rioters were as young as nine.

Even at such tender years, children in urban areas across Britain are being drawn into a brutal gang culture born out of deep-rooted social deprivation.

While this does not excuse the senseless destruction which has cost at least five lives in Britain this week, it is important to look at some of the underlying causes behind the mayhem.

I caught a glimpse of what poverty in a developed country looks like during a visit last year to a youth centre just down the road from Brixton, one of the London neighbourhoods blighted by violence during the four day rampage.

At the end of every school day, poor black, white and Asian children head to the centre where they are given free hot meals and counselling before returning to their often chaotic homes on crumbling public housing estates.

Nine-year-old Claire (not her real name) told me how she had been sleeping in a deserted, rat-infested garden shed with her mother and younger sister until social services found them accommodation.

But Claire’s problems went beyond homelessness, a worker at the centre told me. Her family had been evicted from their flat after her father was sent to prison for drug dealing. Claire’s mother, who was addicted to heroin and had worked as a prostitute, was trying to get clean. “I really, really miss my dad and I was getting really angry at school, coming here has really helped me to calm down,” Claire told me.

This kind of tangled web of social problems is also blighting the lives of countless children in other UK cities.

Poverty line

More than 3.5 million children in Britain live below the poverty line, one of the worst rates in the industrialised world.

A couple with two children living on less than 288 pounds (S$566) a week would be deemed as being below the poverty line in the UK in 2009.

Single parent families make up an estimated 17 per cent of all households and almost 900 children were suspended from school every day for violence or verbal abuse last year.

Not all the rioters were underprivileged, of course, and criminal greed seems to have played its part.  But the sheer scale and spontaneity of the attacks, and the relish with which some of them were carried out, point towards a tinderbox of social problems which has long been lying in wait of a spark.

In truth, it does not take much to spur some deeply dissatisfied youngsters into a frenzy of violence. In many of Britain’s sink estates, fights between large gangs of alcohol fuelled boys, and sometimes girls, are common.

On weekends, young people in deprived areas are known to literally run riot, using knives, bats, bricks and sometimes even guns, as weapons against peers who live in different postcode zones and are therefore viewed as the enemy.

These bursts of meaningless violence often terrify residents but attract little national media attention.

Politicians have tried to enforce various initiatives to tackle the problem, such as court orders which ban individuals from engaging in anti-social behaviours which range from drinking alcohol in public to gathering in street corners, but these have had limited impact.

That is probably because the problems of disaffected youth, living in areas where there is zero aspiration, are too complex to deal with in one fell swoop.

While working for a British charity last year, I was sent to interview young people in Walsall, an area in the West Midlands where youth unemployment stands at about 21 per cent. Just a few miles down the road in Birmingham, three people were killed during this week’s riots.

I met a woman who ran a community centre and told me she got up at 7am every day to pick up kids from their dysfunctional homes, before feeding them breakfast and taking them to school. If she was not there to do it, many of the children would go to classes hungry or not turn up at all.

Little motivation

In the long-run, however, it is difficult to see how these children will stay motivated at school, without proper guidance and encouragement from their parents.

At the centre I also met 17-year-old Luke, who started stealing, carrying a knife and getting into trouble with the police – all at the age of 14. When I spoke to him he was trying to turn his life around by training to be a youth worker.

In sink estates in Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow, I heard similar stories from young men who were trying to turn back from the brink.

Kevin, 17, who lives in Easterhouse, a part of Glasgow where the average life expectancy is 66, told me how he was lured into a gang at a very young age.

“I started getting involved in gang fights when I was 11, because that’s what we all did,” he said. “There’s nothing else to do.”

Where there is gang violence there is also alcohol abuse. In 2008, I interviewed a 10-year-old boy who lives in a part of Glasgow rife with gang crime. He confessed to getting drunk on white cider with friends, but thankfully he said the unpleasant experience had put him off future binges.

“Some of my pals do ask me to drink again, they say ‘go on, just try it’.” he said “But I say ‘no’ because last time I felt really sick and dizzy all day.”

More than 1, 300 children under 16 got in trouble with the police for alcohol related offences in Glasgow last year.

In some parts of the Scottish city, knife crime is one of the leading causes of death among men aged between 15 and 19.

This figure is driven up by the high number of stabbings that occur during gang fights, yet the danger does little to deter young people who feel they belong to a special tribe.

“Being in a gang makes you feel like you are part of something,” said 21-year-old Steven, who became a gang member at the age of 14. “You know they are not really your family, but it can feel like family. It’s to do with upbringing, we are growing up in a culture where gangs are always around.”

A 24-year-old man I spoke to in North Liverpool told me of his feelings of helplessness when he saw a 17-year-old being stabbed to death during a gang fight.
“We tried to get help and save him, but we couldn’t,” he said. “He wasn’t even part of a gang. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

This constant cycle of violence among inner-city youth forms the backdrop to the wave of mayhem that has swept the country. But as well as being the perpetrators, young people themselves can form part of the solution.

Steven, now 21, left gangs after he narrowly missed being smashed over the head with a golf club during a gang fight. He now runs football tournaments to get local children involved in sport instead of gangs.

“I felt I had been given this gift by finding a way out of gangs and I felt I had to give something back,” he said.