KAMPALA, Uganda - The young American boy sums up what his father does for a living: "You stop the bad guys from being mean."
Yes, the father says, but who are the bad guys? The child thinks, then offers a guess: "Star Wars people?"
Though a galaxy away from this preschooler's American upbringing, the truth is far more sinister.
The bad guys are Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army, a brutal Central Africa militia that has kidnapped thousands of children and forced them to become sex slaves, fight as child soldiers and kill family members.
The father-son conversation is one of many gripping moments in a 30-minute video that has rocketed through cyberspace since its release Monday. By late Thursday it had been seen more than 37 million times on YouTube.
The father, Jason Russell, is the co-founder of San Diego-based Invisible Children, an anti-LRA advocacy group, and the film's director. He asks his son, Gavin, what he thinks should be done about Kony.
People are also reading…
"Stop him," Gavin responds.
The boy's words are quickly echoed by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, where Kony is wanted for crimes against humanity.
"Stop him," Moreno-Ocampo says on camera, "and (that will) solve all the problems."
The video is part of a campaign called Kony 2012, and its goal is to see Kony captured - after 26 years in the jungle - this year.
Despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant and the deployment last fall of 100 U.S. special operations forces to four Central African countries to help advise in the fight against Kony, few Americans know who he is.
To the other 99 percent, Russell poses this challenge: Make Kony and his crimes so infamous that governments view it as imperative that the mission to capture him succeeds.
"If we take the pressure off, if we're not successful, he is going to be growing his numbers," Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., tells the film's cameras. "People forget and you've got to remind them. ... And if interest wanes it will just go away. ... It's got to be 2012."
The LRA began its attacks in Uganda in the 1980s, when Kony sought to overthrow the government. Since being pushed out of Uganda several years ago, the militia has terrorized villages in Congo, the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
"Kony is a monster. He deserves to be prosecuted and hanged," Col. Felix Kulayigye, spokesman for Uganda's military, told The Associated Press.
Because of the intensified hunt for Kony, LRA forces - once thousands strong - have diminished in number, splitting into smaller groups that can travel the jungle more easily. Experts estimate the LRA now has about 250 fighters.
Victims are mutilated by machetes, their faces slashed into grotesque shapes. Women are raped and killed. Young girls are forced into sexual slavery.
