495. Terror in Minnesota: The Putinisation of America (Question Time)

21:44Rory Stewart:Well, I think probably tactically, I don't have to be supportive of Kemi Badenow. I'm not a Tory MP, and I think she's gone too far right wing. And she's often echoing reforms, talking points in a way that's daft. But they have an issue, I suppose, which is that they are trying. Many of them are people who are still members of the Conservative Party. They're Conservative MPs. They feel that there was a time when the Tories were more centre-right under David Cameron, or Theresa May. And so, yes, they're hoping to rebuild the Conservative Party. I suspect, though, if Kemi Bednock doesn't listen, that we're talking more about a new constellation in British politics.

22:23Okay, Rory. Last one before we go to the break. Millie in London. Can rhetoric and the art of communication genuinely change the course of history? looking back what are the best and worst examples of public speaking you've ever seen that actually shaped events well carnies might be i think that was a really good example let's

22:42Rory Stewart:i think that's a good one i mean we talked about the last thing but you make a really good case that it could be something that actually goes down in history could do yeah i mean look we we talk a lot about churchill but but the part of the point is is the substance and the moral view it's not just the language. It's true, Churchill had an extraordinary way with words. But when you look at Carney's speech, it's not necessarily that every sentence is a kind of literary masterpiece. It's an argument. It's an argument. And that was true for Churchill. Like him or hate him, he developed a view from the early 1930s onwards that appeasement was catastrophic, and that if you went on appeasing, you'd get weaker and weaker and weaker.

23:25Rory Stewart:What's wonderful about Great Oratory is you get the big idea because governments can always do the small ideas but generally the small ideas are defending the status quo inevitably because you've got used to defending status quo so if you look at i was just rereading on appeasement in the 30s amazing book by tim bovary called the appeasers and what's so striking is that every individual decision you can understand why they made it you know why did you give italy abyssinia well because you didn't want to drive italy into the arms of germany why did you why did you give russia the donbass exactly why did you give russia why did of Germany, the Rhineland.

23:58Rory Stewart:Well, it was very popular in Germany and the French didn't really want to defend it. And Hitler said, if he gets to Rhineland, he'll sign up to a new non-aggression package. But Churchill could see the big picture. And I think Carney can see the big picture. And that's true. You're your hero, Lincoln or Mandela. I mean, essentially, their great speeches are about stepping back and seeing the big picture. And they're often short. By the way, a very good speech I saw recently, which somebody sent to me in Australia was Anthony Albanese on the National Day of Mourning. Now, he got a lot of stick for his seemingly slightly cap-handed handling of the Bondi massacre.

24:34But the speech that he made last week on the National Day of Mourning was really, really impressive. Quite short, eight, nine minutes. Gordon Brown on Scottish Independence, the last ever event.

24:45Rory Stewart:That was a great intervention. Absolutely, yeah. Neil Kinnock. I think Neil Kinnock made two or three speeches that were definitely part of labor history and therefore part of UK history. And sometimes it's even a phrase, isn't it? I mean, the famous one is tough and crime, tough and the cause of the crime, which is your Blair comment. But it's interesting how a phrase can encapsulate a whole policy narrative. A hundred percent. Well, I think Bukhani's phrase was, this is a rupture, not a transition. And then it was what flowed from that. And by the way, if people haven't listened to Neil Kinnik on leading, he's got great oratory even in interviews, isn't he?

25:20Extraordinary.

25:20Rory Stewart:rather than it's not just about speeches and he's so lovely to listen to yeah so lovely to listen i mean he's i was reminded about you know return to our centrist and how much more left-wing he is and someone like me i was also astonished by the number of rebellions i mean i what i couldn't believe is having rebelled 70 times he he said that he could have rebelled much more but actually the whips were so terrified of his rebellions they kept sending him home he would have been well above corbyn in terms of number of rebellions and he became the leader yeah yeah okay let's take a break, Roy. We've talked about Minnesota.

25:50We've talked about the Tories. We've talked about rhetoric. I should warn anybody with particularly got young children listening in the back of the car, possibly, that the second half of the program is a bit different, but it's also quite disturbing. We're going to be talking about child sex abuse online. This is something Roy and I discussed with some leading campaigners on this in Davos, and we've interviewed them the second half.

26:17Rory Stewart:this episode is brought to you by whoop and i'm speaking to you i'm wearing a whoop device on my wrist at the moment politics teaches you fairly quickly that attention is finite when attention is drawn to the loud and urgent it's easy to miss the deeper patterns shaping outcomes and that applies to health as well you keep going you meet demands you get through the day without noticing that the cost is quietly all adding up and taking a toll. Whereas WHOOP exists to bring the background picture into focus, this thing on your wrist is there showing you how your body responds to everyday life, to sleep, to recovery, to strain, and how those rhythms and trends emerge over time.

26:58Rory Stewart:If you want to better understand how you can feel and live at your best for years to come, head to join.whoop.com and get started with WHOOP today. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial so you can try Whoop risk-free and see what you learn.

27:18Now, just a quick pause in the podcast to mention our sponsor, NordVPN.

27:24Rory Stewart:March is the month of forms and figures, tax returns, renewals, end-of-year accounts, transactions containing more of our money and identity than we realise. And as we're doing that, a cyber attack occurs on average every 39 seconds. In the UK, hundreds of cyber-enabled crimes are reported each day, with around£4.5 million lost daily to cybercrime. And this is only going to become more true with AI. We think of security risks as big and dramatic, but increasingly not. They're creeping in through the ordinary, an email that looks plausible, a link that feels routine. That's why I've been using NordVPN to close the gap.

28:03NordVPN encrypts your internet connection, hides your IP address and protects your bank details and passwords so you're not assuming everything online is safe. To get the best discount on your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash restispolitics. You'll get four extra months free on the two-year plan plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the episode description. This episode is brought to you by White Claw Search. Great podcast pick, friend. No surprises there. After all, you're all about finding the tastiest flavors out there, just like White Claw Surge.

28:37Rory Stewart:And with big, bold flavors to enjoy, like blood orange, blackberry, cranberry, and more, it's time to go all in on taste. Unleash the flavor. Unleash White Claw Surge. Please drink responsibly. Hard seltzer with flavors. 8 % alcohol by volume. White Claw Seltzer Works. Chicago, Illinois.

28:58Rory Stewart:Welcome back to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. So, Scarlett from Sydney, it was good to hear you mention the International Justice Mission last week and their important work. Please could you discuss in more depth the extremely disturbing but hugely important politics of child sexual exploitation, including tech-facilitated child abuse? And so just before we go into this, this is something which was very dominant even when I was in government. I remember even when Theresa May was Home Secretary. So we're now back at the David Cameron days from 2010 to 2015.

29:38Rory Stewart:More and more focus was being put by the police on cybercrime, more and more on images. There were more and more prosecutions. in fact so much so that in the us i think if you look at what's happened to the fbi under kash patel they've actually taken the fbi more off this kind of stuff because they felt it was too much emphasis on it but what i think i caught the edge off in davos but you particularly caught the edge is that it isn't that we've been doing too much of it we've barely scratched the surface the problem is getting worse and worse and worse and it's more and more extreme so this is something you've looked into much more depth than me and i'm going to hand over to you on this well i'm going to hand over to two people called Gary Haugen and Molly Hodson, who work for the International Justice Mission.

30:25That's an organization that exists to campaign against violence against the poor. And I had a couple of meetings with them in Davos, and I was genuinely shocked by the scale of this. So it's a really sensitive issue. If you've got children listening, you might actually want to leave it here for now. But I do think this is an incredibly important issue. You can listen to two people who have studied it inside out, who've investigated it, who've worked, who are working with the police to deal with it. But they're looking, the reason why this is such a political issue, they're looking to a government in the world, like Australia is doing with social media and kids to take the lead on this and try to get the law changed in one country and another and try to get the tech oligarchs to do things that can be done to stop this.

31:17Here's the interview. Gary, maybe you start just by telling us what the issue is and the scale of it and why this has become such an important campaign for IGM. Well, you'll probably remember years ago stories of pedophiles from the UK or the US or France or those countries you're naming, who would go travel overseas and especially to Southeast Asia, and they would go purchase the ability to sexually assault children. And it was what we called child sex trafficking. There were traffickers who would assemble these kids in brothels or whatever, and the pedophiles would travel to go sexually assault and abuse them.

31:59And there's been a lot of progress in addressing that. What's happened now is that the pedophiles are not traveling to go do that. They are now directing the sexual abuse of these children online. So they're in front of a screen and a child in Philippines or another place is put in front of a webcam and is being sexually abused for the entertainment of that pedophile. It is now a massive business where hundreds of thousands of children are being sexually abused in front of a webcam for a paying customer somewhere around the world. Hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. To give you a sense of this, because we had been working in the Philippines International Justice Mission for years on the sex trafficking of kids, the traditional kind that I was describing.

32:55Then we started, as we developed relationships with law enforcement, realized they were getting referrals thousands every month from law enforcement around the world saying, hey, there's evidence that there's a pedophile who's been doing live stream sexual abuse, and you should know about it because the people are abusing the Filipino kids, and there's an abuser there who is doing it in front of a webcam for someone who will pay for it. And they were getting thousands of these referrals. And so they came to IJM because we've been working with them and said, hey, can you help us do this? Help us address it.

33:30And so we've done more than a thousand raids to try to work with the authorities to get them out. But then we realized we're just being overwhelmed because we did a prevalence study with the Nottingham University Rights Lab, and it proved that there are about 500 ,000 Filipino children who were sexually abused in front of a webcam in one year, the year 2022. So that gives you just in one country how many hundreds of thousands of kids were sexually abused online for paying customers around the world. Molly, you were trying to get the kind of message out that this is going on, that the tech companies could do more, that the governments could do more.

34:16Is it harder to do that because of the nature of what we're talking about? It's interesting. When we were just over the road and I was telling a couple of people what we're doing and I explained what you were doing. and two women and they they literally recoiled and said no no i don't want to hear is that is do you find that an impediment to what you're trying to do yeah i mean i find this is a

34:35Rory Stewart:difficult subject to bring up at dinner parties or whatever when you and when people ask me what i do and i tell them they're shocked and i think one of the interesting things is they're shocked because they've never heard of it this isn't even registered in their mind that this could be a possibility even when in one country you've had half a million kids yeah in one year it's hidden is pretty much invisible as an issue. And one of the reasons it's invisible is because, as you say, it's disgusting. People don't want to hear about it. So, you know, I'm grateful to you for giving us this opportunity to talk about it because even the media don't even want to go somewhere quite as dark as this.

35:05Rory Stewart:But the reality is that this is a massive global threat to children all around the world. And we're not just talking the Philippines, we're talking in the UK. And that's why it's so critical that people pay attention because these children are at risk right now. and I think one of the things that really struck me when I first heard about this was in the studies that IJM have done in the operations we've worked with police on 40 % of the children are under 12. That is disgusting. Let's take a situation in the Philippines where this is happening and there's the child. Who in the Philippines is making money?

35:43Who in the UK, France, Germany, US, wherever is making money and who's making money between them? How is that all happening? In the Philippines, what you'll see is there's just all kinds of people who have access to a child that's vulnerable. Could be a relative? Could be a relative. It frequently, sadly, is because they have access and trust of a child. But they're living in pretty poor circumstances and somebody offers and they hear about, oh, we can make a few hundred dollars, which is more than they might make in many, many months of work by just taking that young relative of ours and forcing them into sexual acts with their siblings.

36:26Sometimes we've had evidence of this being done actually with animals and just the most horrible things you could possibly imagine. They have access to a vulnerable child. They then connect with this network to be able to broadcast that. And it's not the dog web. No, and that's what's fascinating. You'd think this was all really impossible to find. But in fact, it's using all the regular FaceTime platforms, Meta's platforms, all the standard platforms of video that you would think of. That's why it can be done at this scale where you have half a million children being abused. Monty, which are the biggest markets in terms of ordering these bespoke scenes around the world?

37:11Which are the biggest offenders, as it were?

37:14Rory Stewart:well the u.s is the largest global market for this kind of abuse is that numbers or proportion numbers numbers and upsettingly for us the uk is third and that that makes me feel a bit sick personally so this is somebody who is maybe at home on a laptop yeah with a wife yeah with families kids having their dinner and you might imagine too the way this exploded during covid it. All kinds of people had way too much time on their couch. And if they are inclined to these things, we saw a tremendous escalation of this when people were in their homes. And just as you said, there's, it's a man generally, and yeah, things are going on normally in the family, but he's in his room somewhere and he's in his, you know, fourth hour of entertaining himself.

38:03And in this weirdness, he's got connected to a network that will facilitate sexual abuse with child, which he then directs, do this, do that, do more of this. In real time. In real time. And then there's an addictive thrill to it. And so then they want to do it again and do it again. And it's just so frictionless in terms of the payment system, in terms of zero accountability in the moment for these massive platforms. One of the things that's very exciting is that I see the UK stepping up to leadership on this. Things are moving very slowly in the U.S. to sort of move any kind of legislation that would change things.

38:43But I'm seeing in the U.K. that there's an acceleration of leadership to actually say, no, we can do some things about this and let's go for it. Do you agree with that one? Because, I mean, this has been going on for years, as you say, 2022, half a million kids in the Philippines. Are you saying that because the UK did that thing with Grok and Musk and the bikinification, the nudification of girls and women? It strikes me the fact that I follow politics very, very closely. I follow the media quite closely. I didn't know any of this until I met you the other day. Yeah, I'm not saying that we're blitzing ahead to where we should be in awareness and getting work done.

39:26So what's the political drive that you're seeing in the UK? I'm always sure about that.

39:28Rory Stewart:Yeah, so we're running a campaign at the moment, Tech That Protects, which is all about trying to get that protects. We want tech that protects children. Basically, the reason this happens is because this live stream abuse in particular is not being detected. So you can imagine that existing videos and images of children that are circulating on the internet, the police have seen them, they've given them like a hash code so they can kind of find them and pull them down. But live streamed abuse is happening in real time. So it's much harder to detect. and as a result it's just not being detected but now there are ai tools why why is it not being detected well what what given these tech bros are so to be so damn clever and somebody who's another young woman i was telling you about this our producer said that you know this is crazy because you put if you see a picture of nipple on instagram it gets moderated out right now you're saying that because it's live they can't do that sort of thing no i'm actually saying because it's live, it's been historically really difficult to detect it using usual law enforcement kind of detection tools.

40:30Rory Stewart:However, now that AI tools have been developed, which could actually detect and disrupt this kind of abuse, and you could literally just embed it on your smart device. So we're talking about any camera enabled device with access to the internet, right? So if you wanted to live stream the abuse of a child right now with your phone, you could, and you could do it on a normal social media platform, nothing would happen, nothing would stop you. I could go into what? Telegram? and it doesn't even yeah anything face time easy is it i don't want you to tell me how to do it but how easy is it for me to find the means and the mechanism then to be able to sit in there saying i want a 10 year old boy and a six year old girl and i want them to do this no if that's what you're into you can just go in and make your inquiries online and you'll get connected very very quickly towards that but why is there nothing that's then alerting and why why i think one of the most powerful actors or dynamics in this is that the platforms are allergic to any indication that they are looking at what you are doing on their platform and doing anything about it because they want you to do that but you want to feel free to be able to just do what you are doing online and they because of these privacy concerns right it's generally done up in the concerns about privacy But I find that most people, if they realize, okay, here's a little compromise that we might make on being completely free to do whatever you want online versus hundreds of thousands of children being abused.

41:57I think most people say, yeah, let's just stop this.

42:00Rory Stewart:And that's the thing, right? Because if we can have tools on devices, and this is possible, this has already been proven to be possible. There are safety tech companies that have already developed these kinds of tools that could say, like, you're trying to look at a prepubescent child that's engaged in a sexual act. That's illegal content. No one has a right to have that on device, right? We're actually going to stop you from being able to even create that. can you imagine the number of children who would be protected if the actual abuse was never able to be created in the first place and that's what on-device protection could enable that's safety by design it means that we're like making your device safe so that you can't live stream a sexual act with a child right so that's what we're kind of that's what we're calling for that's what we'd really love the uk government to take a lead in but what we're seeing is you know that all of this is possible anyone could do it tomorrow right but there needs to be an incentive to actually make this happen and so we're calling on governments to to require device manufacturers and operating systems to use these kinds of tools develop their own doesn't have to be a certain product but that can do that has that capability to keep millions of children safe around the world is there a danger that ai is going to make this even worse or presumably through ai you could do synthetic child abuse stuff.

43:21Is that happening already?

43:22Rory Stewart:Yeah, it's already happening. And I think just a further point on the previous one is that these new tools, these AI detection tools are privacy preserving. So they don't break encryption. They don't break personal privacy, which has been until now one of the major concerns. But now that isn't a valid concern because you can have these tools that are compatible with keeping your device private because it just stopped it before it started, right? To your point around AI and fueling abuse, absolutely. What we're seeing now is we saw something like a 1300 % increase in generative AI child abuse material in one year.

44:011300%. This is the moment we're in where AI can do, yes, all these positive things. And in fact, AI can be applied to this situation by stopping your phone from even being able to record this. or you could use AI to make then synthetic child abuse images. And so that increases the value of any given child abuse image that you have because not only have you made money off it now, but now you're going to make a synthetic additional characterization and then use that for even further exploitation. So again, this is our moment. Either AI is used to actually protect children or it's being used to further abuse them and people are going to make money off of it.

44:46I do think, Alistair, that as people just understand that this is happening, they're going to raise their voice and expect their governments to respond. Well, they saw it. I mean, our governments saw it through public opinion with the bikini thing. This is on a scale that is so, so, so much worse. Yeah. And yet I get this sense from talking to you guys that you've struggled to get governments around the world to see this as an issue. Is that because they're scared of the tech pros? Is it because some of them are in league with organized crime? First of all, it's just baseline awareness, right?

45:26Because we're busy, we're seeing all kinds of things, and they get focused on, oh, here's a problem. That's just difficult to do. But we're seeing breakthroughs in that. I've never had a conversation with a decent person who they weren't outraged the way you were and didn't say, well, what could I do about it? And that's why we're here right now. I just do – I have a certain amount of confidence as we continue to get the word out and as government authorities are aware of, oh, there are some very doable fixes to this. And yes, there's tremendous power in the tech companies. There are leaders actually in the sector who don't want their devices and don't want their platforms associated with this.

46:13But they need to know that the public cares and that it's expensive for their brand to be associated with it. And Molly, let's just take the UK and the law because every country will have their own law and in some countries states will have their own laws. And this online stuff is really, really complicated. the British guy who's sitting at home making up these scenes and and and having other people in front of a camera force children to do things that they don't want to do and shouldn't even be thinking of doing what crime are they committing if they for example instruct for a child to be raped are we are we've we caught up with this in terms of our of our law do you know I think that

46:54Rory Stewart:The law is constantly trying to keep up with how fast these crimes are evolving and moving. And so, yeah, one thing we have seen is that there's often a bit of a lag. And so when a man has actually literally asked for a child to be raped for him, sometimes you see really low sentences for that. And that's not okay. But it depends on the court. Sometimes you get a higher sentence for that. A lot of the time it depends on the judge. How many people around the world have been convicted and jailed for this stuff? Well, I think what's actually quite shocking is how few. I mean, there was a piece recently in the New York Times talking about US offenders, and they said that something like 0.0001 % of crimes of this nature had actually led to a conviction.

47:41And here's the thing. In the Philippines, the Philippine authorities have actually taken tremendous responsibility for this. The president of the Philippines has said this is a national crisis. We need to address it. And so law enforcement has done a very strong job in trying to bring convictions. IJM has participated in bringing more than 100 convictions in the Philippines for this. However, if it is so easy, if it is so profitable for so many people, law enforcement is going to be overwhelmed. And the answer is the actual devices that are facilitating this, the actual platforms that are facilitating this.

48:19This is the only fail-safe solution to address it at scale. And so we will keep pursuing the prosecution and the law enforcement efforts, but to ask them to do that out there without the obvious fixes that just decent companies could take to be able to shut this down, that doesn't make sense. Okay. But when you started the conversation, Gary, you talked about when pedophiles used to fly off somewhere. I think often they talked about Thailand. Where are the countries where this is most prevalent? Which of the countries that really suffer from this? You mentioned the Philippines several times. Is that the worst place?

48:53Philippines is ground zero because they have a lot of children in poverty. They use English, a lot of English speakers and very excellent broadband in the country. And so it's sort of the perfect storm there. But there are other places like that. And so the world needs to get equipped for this spreading to more and more places. We've seen this in South Asia. We've seen this in other places in Southeast Asia as well, and then even in Latin America and Africa. So it's wherever there are vulnerable children and lots of vulnerable children. Now the ubiquity of broadband and people's capacity to correspond to each other, you can get over the language barrier now because of AI, be able to do the translation.

49:37So just picture in your mind millions upon millions of vulnerable children in an endless market of those who want to purchase this kind of sick thing. And the other thing about it is that it's not that there's a ton of people who have an appetite for this, but they bring so much money to the table that they create a disproportionately massive market. There's a big market if you talk about half a million kids in the Philippines.

50:02Rory Stewart:Well, I mean, it is actually kind of shocking that we've seen recent evidence that said that one in 13 US men had either live streamed sexually with an under 18 or said that they would, which, I mean, that's sobering, isn't it? Yeah. Then again, Gary, I don't want to get too political about your country, but if you've got the current president with his record in relation to attitudes to girls and women, and you've had the old Epstein thing and what have you, maybe that is another political challenge that makes your life even more difficult? Well, there definitely are responsible leaders in the US, in the Congress, and even in the administration who want to address these things.

50:47But I would just say it's moving slowly. And there's going to be no let up in the United States because we are the number one offender around the world buying this. And so it makes sense that we would need to continue that fight. But what's so interesting is how it can be sped up in the United States when other countries see look this can be done it's politically quite doable and so we've seen australia moving on a number of these child protection issues and others follow others follow and so this is i

51:19Rory Stewart:think an opportunity for the uk to lead in the space and like one thing i think is if you could easily put on a device a tool that would prevent you from being able to upload a child being sexually violated, who's prepubescent. Why would you not do that? That's who you should have on the podcast after that, is the people who don't want to do that, who want to produce a device and they don't want to put something on there that would stop hundreds of thousands of children from being sexually abused. I guess my final thought on this, a police officer in the Philippines finds that a child has been abused in the way that we've been talking about.

52:00What happens then that leads to a British police force being able to find out who has ordered that abuse? Is that an easy process or not? Well, when there's good coordination, they can share intelligence about that and they can share the digital trace back to the one who has purchased it. They can do that. They can. And one of the things that's also important is the financial transaction is so seamless on the web now that that leaves another way of tracing this. And so, you know, we have all these tremendous capabilities to trace money laundering and so forth. There will also be an opportunity for the financial crimes sector to be able to find, oh, these are suspicious transactions.

52:53The AI again can see that these are transactions that have these indicators that they are suspicious for child abuse transactions. And so there's going to be a lot of very positive work that the financial crime sector can also do.

53:08Rory Stewart:Can I add on to that? So I think one of the things that's interesting about that is that does happen and it is happening, but it can take a really long time. And so just to put that into context a survivor who spoke in parliament very eloquently last year could have heard a pin drop she when she was 12 years old and i'm sure we can all imagine being 12 years old probably you were at school i was at school you were at school she's super intelligent she wanted to go to school her parents had a friend who said i'll take you to school in manila so they let her go to school with this guy in manila she goes to school she's delighted she comes home from school and he says the way that you're going to pay for this is you're going to do these disgusting acts in front of a webcam for people all around the world to watch live she's 12 years old she has no choice she is in a completely alien city no way of contacting her parents so she has to do it she does this every day after school for five years before IJM and please bring her to safety that's what we want to stop imagine if the device that that man in the uk had been using could not receive that and the device that the person in the philippines was using couldn't create it she would never have been abused well listen good luck with all your work alistair can i ask you a cheeky question yeah go on if you were trying to make some noise about this and actually get some action what would you do um i tried to break down the thing we talked about at the top yeah the instinctive reaction that people have to say i don't want to hear this right and i think the the thing i would try to do is to get a brilliant filmmaker with real investigative powers to get right into the guts of this and show how it's done possibly even along the way have to do some things that they wouldn't want to do but show how it's done show how easy it is and then show the real life consequences at their end and i think the other thing i would do in those countries where you think you can make progress uk australia i think you're starting in the right places probably but then canada probably i don't know you mentioned asia whether maybe japan south korea i don't know but but form an international or political alliance that really gets out.

55:29But I think you need a really big media moment. And even though you're on the UK's number one podcast, Gary, it's not necessarily going to be the global media moment you need. We're counting on it, Alistair. But I think most people can actually think back when they learned of something terrible going on in the world. And I think the odds are very high because of the movie they saw. And even a lot of people learning about sex trafficking, the first thing I was describing, because that's because they saw Liam Neeson in Taken, right? or I was the director of the genocide investigation in Rwanda. No one seemed to pay attention to that until Hotel Rwanda.

55:59And there are some filmmakers and artists who now will just point to the most significant thing they ever did in their life. It was a film. Well, that's why I – I mean I was thinking mainly documentary but you're absolutely right. So that's where I would go. I would try to work on the – you've obviously got to raise the money and that's why you're in places like Davos and all that. I get that. But I think in terms of getting the media and politics more interested, I think it's about you need a really big breakthrough moment that says this is a massive issue. You people have not been – you've been looking away and you've got to look back in.

56:37Rory Stewart:Well, if any are listening, we're up for it. Yep. If you go either if Steven Spielberg listens or if the great documentary makers – I'm sure he does. He must do. Any self-respecting great artist of our era is listening right now. Gary, thank you for saying so. We should do Rwanda another day. Thanks a lot, both of you. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Cheers.

57:03So there you are, Gary Haugen and Molly Hodgson of the International Justice Mission. I hope you found that informative. What do you make of it?

57:12Rory Stewart:Yeah, I thought it was really important. And I'd like to see us maybe occasionally do a little bit more of taking one issue in depth and talking to people. I think it's a good way of doing question time. I mean, of course, I'm aware, having said that, we're now going to receive about 10 ,000 emails from every campaigning organization, NGO in the world. But I did think it was very worthwhile doing. And I think it's nice to have an opportunity to do a deep policy dive. So thank you for doing that. It's interesting, the different organizations that have been working on this. This is one of the most prominent.

57:42Rory Stewart:But since you mentioned this in the last podcast, I've received emails from many, many different people working from other NGOs and nonprofits working on this. And actually some Americans who've put a great deal of their own money into trying to change the way that tech platforms operate on this. but it's it's so salient so central and so much of the heart actually of a lot of politics at the moment which centers a lot around these issues without doing much on it yeah i also one of the most striking things to me talking to molly was when she said that children everywhere are at risk of this driven in part by poverty well we have a lot of child poverty in the uk we have child poverty across europe we have child poverty across the world so gary haugen was making the point that this is an issue of vulnerable children.

58:28And I felt, you know, you and I both follow politics and media very, very closely. I just, I do feel this is something that because it's so disgusting, people, including politicians, don't really want to address it. And what they're basically saying, and they mentioned Jess Phillips a couple of times when we were speaking offline, they want a politician, they want a government to pick this up and say, we are going to make the change necessary.

58:52Rory Stewart:Yeah. And one of the issues maybe in the background is that because Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk and others have put so much focus on child sex abuse, and you've seen it with the Rotherham gangs, and have weaponized it so much in terms of anti-Muslim sentiment, accusing them of being involved in raping young children. A lot of the mainstream parties hear the word child sex abuse and get worried get worried this is about populism or nationalism whereas actually what they should be doing is the opposite they should be saying we care deeply about this issue this is the most important issue and we're going to take the lead on this and we're going to grip this regardless of what race or ethnicity anybody comes from yeah anyway thank you gary thank you molly for drawing that to our attention and i hope that some great filmmaker or documentary maker takes up my idea and gets in touch with you.

59:47See you soon.

59:48Rory Stewart:See you. Bye-bye.

59:52Rory Stewart:This episode was brought to you by Penguin Audiobooks. They're our audiobook club partners, selecting titles that help us understand modern politics and how power really works. And one of the titles that we strongly recommend in audio form is The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleiman, a previous guest on Leading and one of the absolute leading voices on AI. Yeah, so this is the guy that with Demis Hassabis put together this extraordinary British company, which is our great tech success. But in it, Mustafa developed some of the ideas that he discussed with us on the podcast. And in fact, that we've been getting into a little bit in our AI miniseries.

1:00:33Rory Stewart:He basically is somebody who is a believer in the power of AI, but also is very serious about how much regulation it needs and how we can't be just naive about just letting it rip. So he's in a very interesting position. He's in an increasingly powerful position at the heart of these companies building it. But he's also gently, subtly and thoughtfully trying to strike the balance between technological innovation, development and safety. And I think one of the reasons it works really well in audio is that he's got a big argument and he sets that out at the beginning that just takes you step by step through a series of very complicated issues, but which he explains, I think, really simply.

1:01:13It doesn't surprise me at all that every time I go through an airport anywhere at the moment, there's his book sitting there, but get it on audio. It's great. You visit penguin.co.uk slash trip. You browse our audiobook club. We find a link to the coming wave in our bio. Find Penguin Audiobooks now on Spotify.

1:01:35Rory Stewart:Rinse knows that greatness takes time, but so does laundry. So Rinse will take your laundry and hand deliver it to your door, expertly cleaned. And you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great. We'll see you next week.