I didn't set out to become the person who makes documentaries about the worst things people do to each other online. It happened gradually - one investigation leading to the next, each one darker than the last, each one harder to leave behind when the cameras stopped rolling.
By the time I was standing inside a decommissioned trafficking compound in the Philippines, flanked by officers from the Philippine National Police, I was three documentaries deep into a world that most people only encounter as a news headline. This is what I've learned.
The Internet Isn't a Separate World
The biggest mistake journalists and broadcasters make when covering online harm is treating the internet as if it exists in a separate dimension - a virtual space where different rules apply. It doesn't. Every catfish scam has a real victim who lost real money. Every trafficking operation has real people behind a keyboard and real people in a compound. Every manosphere forum has real young men reading it and real women bearing the consequences.
When we made Hunting the Catfish Crime Gang, I started by thinking I was investigating a digital fraud. By the end, I was in Bangkok, then at a compound on the Myanmar border, watching people who had been trafficked and forced to run romance scams on Western victims. The internet was just the delivery mechanism. The harm was entirely physical.
"Every catfish scam has a real victim who lost real money. The internet is just the delivery mechanism. The harm is entirely physical."
You Have to Go Where the Story Is
There's a version of documentary-making where you sit in a studio, interview experts via Zoom, and narrate over stock footage. That version is easier, cheaper, and almost entirely useless for the kind of stories I make.
The Philippines trip for the Catfish documentary wasn't scheduled. It emerged from the investigation. A source gave us a lead. The lead pointed to a location. The location required us to get on a plane. That's how it works when you're actually following the story rather than constructing a narrative around what you already know.
The same was true for Hunting the Online Sex Predators. We embedded with the National Crime Agency and went on live raids. Not reconstructions. Not interviews after the fact. The actual operations, in real time, with real consequences if anything went wrong. That's the only way to make television that tells the truth.
What the Camera Doesn't Capture
There are things that happen on location that never make the final cut - not because they're not important, but because television has a runtime and an editorial shape. The conversations in the car on the way to a raid. The silence in a room after an arrest. The moment a trafficking victim looks at you and you realise you have no idea what to say.
Those moments don't disappear when the edit is finished. They stay with you. I think they're supposed to. If you can walk away from this kind of work completely unaffected, you probably shouldn't be making it.
The Manosphere Was the Hardest
Men of the Manosphere was the most complex documentary I've made - not because of physical danger, but because of the nature of the subject. With trafficking, the moral clarity is absolute. With the manosphere, it's murkier.
The men I spoke to weren't monsters. Many of them were lonely, confused, and had found a community online that gave them identity and purpose - even if that community was built on misogyny and resentment. Understanding that doesn't mean excusing it. But if you go into that world looking for cartoon villains, you'll miss the actual story, which is about how young men are being radicalised by algorithms and loneliness, and what that means for the women in their lives.
The Guardian called it "a thoughtful, tender, terrifying hour." That's the balance I was trying to strike. Terrifying because the content is terrifying. Thoughtful because the only way to address a problem is to actually understand it.
What Making These Films Has Taught Me
Five years in, here's what I know: the internet's darkest corners are not a niche concern. They are mainstream. The catfishing scam that defrauded a pensioner in Manchester is connected to a trafficking operation in Southeast Asia. The manosphere forum that radicalised a teenager in Leeds is connected to a pattern of violence against women that shows up in crime statistics. These are not separate issues. They are the same issue, seen from different angles.
Television has a responsibility to show that connection - not to sensationalise it, not to exploit the people caught up in it, but to make it visible in a way that demands a response. That's what I'm trying to do. That's what I'll keep trying to do.
The next investigation is already underway. I can't say what it is yet. But if the last five years are anything to go by, it will take me somewhere I didn't expect to go, and it will be harder to make than I think it will be. That's usually a sign you're onto something worth making.
