Invisible Children Responds to Criticism About ‘Stop Kony’ Campaign
A new campaign spreading across the Internet says it has one goal in mind: To bring to justice Joseph Kony, the Ugandan leader of the violent, child-recruiting Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
The viral film, with tens of millions of views in the last day alone, was created by Invisible Children, a charity that seeks to end the conflict in Uganda and raises awareness about human rights abuses by Kony and the LRA.
But some activists have voiced concerns about the methods used by Invisible Children, such as manipulating the facts, to promote its cause.
Jedediah Jenkins, director of idea development for Invisible Children, called the criticism “myopic” and said the film represented a “tipping point” in that it got young people to care about an issue on the other side of the planet that doesn’t affect them.
#StopKony has been trending worldwide on Twitter since Tuesday, and, as of this writing, the video “Kony2012” has a combined 47 million views on YouTube and Vimeo — 32 million of which were in the last 20 hours alone.
Kony is undeniably brutal, and the World Bank estimates that under his leadership the LRA has abducted and forced around 66,000 children to fight with them during the past two decades. In October, President Obama committed 100 U.S. troops to help the Ugandan army remove Kony.
But in November, a Foreign Affairs article pointedly challenged the tactics used by Invisible Children and other nonprofits working in the region. “Such organizations have manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil,” the magazine wrote.
One of Invisible Children’s partner organizations, Resolve, responded to the accusation at the time in a blog post, calling it a “serious charge … published with no accompanying substantiation.”
Jenkins maintained Wednesday that the numbers of child abductions the charity uses are not exaggerated. They are often the same numbers as the ones used by Human Rights Watch and the United Nations, he said.
Charity Navigator, a U.S.-based charity evaluator, gives Invisible Children mixed rankings. The charity received four of four stars financially and two stars for the category of accountability and transparency.