Season 2009 2009

Unreported World reveals the devastating effects of child marriage and pregnancy in Nigeria, where nearly half of all girls in the country's northern states are married by the age of 15, often to much older men.

Nima Elbagir finds the child soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Army being told that they are engaged in a war against the entire world as they take over villages and wage a campaign of terror

Jenny Kleeman reveals how, at the same time as Pol Pot's accomplices are put on trial, Cambodia's people are once again being brutally driven from their land, this time by a property boom fueled by tourism.

Ramita Navai reports that 200 girls and women have been victims of honour killings in the past year alone and that a new law outlawing honour killings may have led to a huge increase in forced suicides.

Seyi Rhodes finds that ten years on from one of the most brutal conflicts in recent history, a population which has lived through rape, torture and public executions is served by just one psychiatrist

Aidan Hartley visits a country locked in a vicious cycle of environmental disaster, hunger, poverty and reliance on international aid

Oliver Steeds witnesses North Koreans who flee to China, forced to live in miserable conditions and vulnerable to being sent back to hard labour camps, some commit suicide, others are easy targets for sex traffickers and some are even sold into marriage to Chinese husbands

Aidan Hartley visits North East India, where vast subterranean coal fires burn out of control beneath towns and villages, children mine coal day in day out, and half a million people are being moved out of their ancestral villages to make way for the coal mines fuelling India's growth.

Peter Oborne finds that the resurgent Taliban and increasingly powerful criminal gangs are creating levels of instability and lawlessness that many liken to the period before the Taliban's first rise to power

Unreported World travels to one of the most remote parts of the world, to investigate the growth of 'witch' murders in Papua New Guinea. More than fifty people accused of being witches were tortured and murdered last year in two provinces alone and the programme reveals that the problem is now spreading from remote highland areas into the towns. Reporter Ramita Navai and producer Katherine Churcher meet the victims, the so called witch hunters and the police struggling to keep order.

Reporter Evan Williams and director Paul Kittel travel to the Brazilian city of Recife, a beach paradise visited by thousands of British tourists every year. They uncover allegations that the police are involved in death squads that have murdered thousands of 'undesirables', including hundreds of street children, every year.

Unreported World uncovers the largely hidden but bloody conflict in the Russian Republic of Ingushetia. In a country to which few Western journalists have been able get access, Unreported World reveals allegations that hundreds of innocent civilians are disappearing and being tortured and murdered by the security forces in an increasingly violent campaign that threatens to turn into another Chechnya.

Unreported World uncovers a deepening sectarian conflict between Muslims and Christians in the Philippines. The battle for land on the southern Filipino island of Mindanao has already claimed 100,000 lives and created a humanitarian disaster with 600,000 people being driven from their homes.

Unreported World travels deep into the Peruvian jungle to investigate how the government's auctioning off vast tracts of the Amazon rainforest to global corporations has led to violent clashes with thousands of indigenous tribal people.

Unreported World reveals how Liberia is facing a child rape crisis. Six years after the end of a brutal civil war in which rape was routinely used as a weapon, children still face the daily fear of being attacked, and the west African country's hospitals are overwhelmed with child victims - a quarter of them under four years of age. Reporter Jenny Kleeman and director Matt Haan begin their disturbing journey in the Liberian capital, Monrovia. They meet Mercy, a six-year-old girl who was abducted and raped two weeks previously. She is now taking drugs to try to stop her from contracting HIV and lives in a safe house, run by a Liberian charity, many of whose inhabitants can never return home; reporting the rape is seen as disgracing the family, especially if the perpetrator is a relative.

Bus drivers in Guatemala City are being murdered at a rate of one every other day as part of a campaign of extortion that threatens to bring the city to its knees. Extortion is the main source of income for Guatemala's criminal gangs, earning them millions of dollars a year, and the drivers are killed to instil fear as the gangs maintain their grip on the city.

Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Matt Haan begin their journey at Santa Rosa on the outskirts of the city. A bus driver has been shot at nine in the morning. The family have already arrived at the scene and are distraught. The bus company owner says he doesn't know why his driver was shot, but eight other divers have been killed on the same route in the last year.

As the French and British governments discuss how to deal with migrants camped outside Calais, Unreported World travels to the European Union's eastern border, to the illicit crossing points for hundreds of thousands of Afghans making their way to our shores.

Reporter Jenny Kleeman and director Jacob Waite begin their journey on Turkey's north-west coast, just eight miles from Greece and the EU. It's 2.40am and the team come across a people smuggler and 25 migrants - men, women, children and even toddlers, all from Afghanistan.

Escalating violence in South Sudan has claimed more lives in 2009 than the conflict in Darfur, but has been largely ignored by the western media. Reporter Ramita Navai and director Julie Noon uncover a disturbing new trend of women and children being directly targeted. More than 2000 people have been killed in 2009 in South Sudan, and a quarter of a million people displaced. The unrest is threatening to destroy the 2005 peace deal that ended Africa's longest and bloodiest civil war, which lasted 22 years and saw over two million people killed.

Unreported World highlights the tragic plight of Nepal's child widows, some of whom are as young as thirteen. Many face abuse and servitude for the rest of their lives, ostracised by their families and communities, and often forced to sell their bodies to provide food and shelter for themselves and their children.

Reporter Yemi Ipaye and director Katherine Churcher begin their journey in south-eastern Nepal. Nearly half the country's population live here and child marriage is prevalent. The team meets frail and fragile 14-year-old Gita, who was forced into marriage against her will by her parents when she was just 11 years old. At 13 she became a widow, and has been ostracised, treated with contempt and told that she's cursed. She says her parents are trying to get her remarried and that they sometimes beat her.

Unreported World reveals shocking evidence that Burmese refugees fleeing the country's brutal military regime are being detained and then allegedly sold by Malaysian immigration officials to Thai human traffickers.

Reporter Aidan Hartley and director George Waldrum travel to Kuala Lumpur to highlight how the refugees are forced to exchange one hellish existence for another. Living in complete fear of the state, the refugees claim they are being rounded up and subjected to bloody whippings and indefinite imprisonment in overcrowded detention camps. As Unreported World reveals, for some this is just the beginning of a horrific journey into the trafficking network, where men, women and children disappear into a world of slavery and prostitution.

Unreported World travels to Israel to reveal how the rapid growth of Jewish 'fundamentalists' is creating tension within Israeli society and endangering any negotiations on a peace deal with the Palestinians.

Reporter Evan Williams and director Alex Nott begin their journey in the Mea Sharim district of Jerusalem. It's the heartland of ultra-Orthodox Jews known as the Haredi, or 'those who fear God'. They find a poor, overcrowded part of the city where everyone is wearing clothes in the style of 18th-century Europe, from where most of their ancestors came. 'We are the real Jews,' says one community leader, 'everyone else in Israel just happens to be born Jewish.'