The Documentary Podcast

In India, a child goes missing every eight minutes. BBC South Asia Correspondent Rajini Vaidyanathan meets the family of one of those children and follows their attempts to trace their daughter. It’s a journey that takes us into the murky world of human trafficking, where children are bought and sold as commodities – forced to work long hours in factories, brothels or as domestic servants. And far from slowing the trade, the Coronavirus has fuelled demand for child labour and led to an increase in child trafficking as ‘middle-men’ target communities worst-hit by the pandemic.

The US election has amplified political and racial divisions across the nation, so how do voters feel about the splits in their society?

Host Nuala McGovern is in Reno, Nevada, speaking to people across the political spectrum to hear how they feel about the vote and the state of their nation. In this election assumptions have been overturned and expectations upended. Double the number of Black voters are believed to have supported President Trump at the polls compared to 2016, and several prominent Republicans publicly declared they were voting for Joe Biden, instead of the leader of their own party.

Among our conversations, we hear from three Black Trump supporters about why they voted for him, and two women from opposing sides of the political fence on the controversy surrounding the voting and counting.

Eighteen fishermen from Sicily are in jail in Benghazi, accused of fishing in Libya’s waters. And in this part of the Mediterranean, rich in the highly-prized and lucrative red prawn, these kinds of arrests are frequent. Usually the Libyans release the men after negotiations. This time it’s different. General Khalifa Haftar – the warlord with authority over the east of Libya – is demanding a prisoner swap: the freeing of four Libyans in jail in Sicily convicted of human trafficking and implicated in the deaths of 49 migrants, in return for the fishermen. For Assignment, Linda Pressly explores a little-known conflict in the Mediterranean - the so-called, ‘Red Prawn War’ and its fall-out.

(Image: Domenico Asaro, a third generation fishermen from Mazara del Vallo who has been arrested at sea by Libya three times. Credit: BBC)

Native American women are trafficked, murdered and raped at five to ten times the national rate of other American women. The figures are gruelling. Each year, hundreds of girls and women go missing. Many end up dead. A complex system of tribal, state and federal law means many of these women are often failed by law enforcement when it comes to investigating their disappearances. LeAndra Nephin, from the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska, tells the story of America’s forgotten native girls, and how a new generation of warrior women is fighting back against abuse.

As the presidential election campaign nears its conclusion, another American city witnesses protests for racial justice after police officers shoot dead a black man on the streets of Philadelphia. Host Nuala McGovern shares several conversations on the prominence of race in this election campaign including two police officers from New York and Missouri and several Black Lives Matter protesters in Charlotte, North Carolina. After the presidential debates promoted controversy around white supremacy groups, we also hear the individual stories of a man and woman who joined Neo Nazi groups in the US and their fears for post-election America.

Ahead of the US presidential election on 3 November, two socially distanced views of the pre-election political landscape of America, explore different perspectives on key issues and themes from the last four years of the Trump presidency and a campaign curtailed by Covid-19 restrictions. Susan Glasser writes a Letter from Trump’s Washington column for the New Yorker magazine. She has been critical of the way Donald Trump has governed. Joe Borelli is a New York City Council member, a Republican who represents Staten Island. He is a regular contributor to talk radio and TV and is an outspoken critic of the Covid-19 policies of the city’s mayor Bill de Blasio and New York’s Governor Cuomo.

Qian Xuesen is widely celebrated in China as the father of the country’s rocket programme, and the man who kick-started its exploration of space. China is now second only to the US in terms of its dominance among the stars. But Qian also had an important part to play in the early scientific advances, before World War Two, that would eventually take the US to the moon. However, he is almost entirely forgotten by the country that nurtured his talent for decades, before anti-communist persecution sent him back to China, the land of his birth. Kavita Puri traces the rise and fall - and rise again - of an extraordinary life.

Seventy years ago tens of thousands of North Korean troops invaded South Korea. Over the next three years one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th Century claimed millions of lives. On a more positive note, though, the Korean War helped precipitate social change in the United States. Following President Truman’s Executive Order 9981, the Korean conflict became the first in which US armed forces were desegregated. It was not a smooth process but it did precede civil rights advances back home where segregation was still widespread, especially in the southern states. This is the story of why President Truman, who had himself expressed clear racist views earlier in his career, took the decision to issue his executive order to desegregate the armed forces.

Nuala McGovern speaks with truck drivers and farmers in the United States as they share their thoughts on how their lives and livelihoods have been under the past four years of the Trump presidency. Wisconsin is known as America’s Dairyland. It’s an important state in this election, where the vote could go either way, and where more than one in ten of the electorate are farmers. Three farmers in Wisconsin explain how trade deals by the US have impacted what happens on their farms and how that affects their votes this time. And three truckers -Michael in Arizona, Pat in Indianapolis and Sunny in California - describe what they have seen driving across the country over the past four years.

By the middle of the 20th century, the English town of Grimsby was the biggest fishing port in the world. When the catch was good “fishermen could live like rock stars”, says Kurt Christensen who first went to sea aged 15. He was instantly addicted to a tough and dangerous life on the waves. But from the 1970s onwards, the industry went into decline. Today it contributes just a tenth of one percent to Britain’s GDP – less than Harrods, London best known department store. So how can such a tiny industry cause so much political havoc and threaten to scupper a post Brexit deal with Europe? Fishing communities have often blamed EU membership - and the foreign boats that have arrived as a result - for a steep fall in catches over the last half century. Many coastal towns voted overwhelmingly for Britain to leave the European Union. Now, Grimsby’s recently-elected Conservative MP – the first non-socialist the town has sent to Westminster in nearly 100 years - has spoken of a modern fleet and fresh opportunities. For Assignment, Lucy Ash travels to Grimsby to hear how fishing towns like this, ignored for decades by London’s political elite, now hope finally to turn a corner. She explores the huge place fishing plays in the British psyche and asks if the cold, stormy seas around Britain really can make coastal communities rich once again.

Producer Mike Gallagher

(Image: A trader examines a haddock at the daily Grimsby Fish Market auction. Credit: Bethany Clarke/Getty Images)