David Farnor | On 16, Feb 2017

BBC Three and Stacey Dooley are heading to Canada and Japan for two new documentaries.

One of the online TV channel’s favourite filmmakers, Stacey has been involved in BBC Three since her life took an unexpected turn when she travelled to India in 2007 as a contributor for the series Blood, Sweat And T-Shirts, to live and work alongside the people in the Indian fashion industry.

Since then she has embarked on a series of investigations, tackling topics such as domestic abuse in the UK, sex trafficking and underage sex slavery in Cambodia and the dark side of tourism in Thailand and Kenya. More recently, she travelled to Northern Iraq, for Guns, Girls And ISIS, to meet the all-female Yazidi battalion fuelled to take revenge against the so-called Islamic State.

Now, she will return to front two hard-hitting documentaries: Young Sex For Sale In Japan and Canada’s Lost Girls.

“I feel like they have a similar tone to the last few we’ve made,” says Dooley. “Prior to Canada and Japan we were in Northern Iraq, following Yazidi women. So there is a definite strength now, that didn’t necessarily exist at the very start of my career.”

In Canada, Stacey will question why thousands of woman and girls from the indigenous community have been tragically murdered or disappeared, with many not receiving justice.

“I’m pleased this episode was commissioned because I genuinely believe this a story few of us outside of Canada are that familiar with,” she adds. “The number of indigenous women that go missing or are murdered is totally disproportionate [with the size of the population].”

In Japan, Stacey examines the serious problem of the sexualisation of children, from bars where men pay to meet schoolgirls to suggestive pictures of very young children.

“Our documentary on Japan essentially focuses on the fact that they [the Government of Japan] only made it illegal to possess child pornography in 2014,” she comments. “We set out to try and understand why it took a privileged country, like Japan, so long to come to this conclusion and also to see if the change in their law had made any real difference on the ground.”

“My personal belief is that their needs to be a shift in some peoples mentality, and more broadly in some subcultures, for us to see real change,” she continues. “For me, more can be done and there needs to be a serious sense of urgency.”

The two documentaries will air later this year on BBC Three. For more on what’s coming soon to the online channel, click here.

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