I think ±«Óãtv3 gave me my first commissions because I wasn't a middle-class, highbrow journalist. I was able to speak to the contributors on a level that perhaps some journalists don't.
Born in 1987 in Luton, Stacey Dooley left school at 15 to work as a shop assistant. By 2007, when she was a twenty-something working in fashion retail, her life changed when she was selected to take part in the ±«Óãtv series Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts. The documentary followed Dooley and other British fashion consumers as they travelled to India to live and work alongside Indian factory workers making clothes for the UK High Street.
Her fresh and very different approach to current affairs, in a voice that was both penetrating and empathetic, stood out. Since then she has embarked on a series of highly acclaimed ‘Stacey Dooley Investigates…’, confronting both difficult and dangerous topics; from sex trafficking and under-age sex slavery in Cambodia to the dark side of tourism in Thailand and Kenya; from domestic abuse in the UK to the global war on drugs.
In 2016, her hard-hitting series for ±«Óãtv3 Sex in the Strange Places saw Dooley travel to Turkey, Russia, Brazil and Syria to uncover the shocking stories about these countries’ attitudes towards sex and prostitution. Later the same year, she travelled to Syria to investigate Gun Girls and ISIS.
Subsequent programmes would uncover the dangerous world of child pornography in Japan, the missing indigenous girls of Canada and the growing criminal world of Britain’s digital drug dealers. She also worked with Children In Need to explore the number of homeless young people here in the UK.
Awards and nominations followed and her 2018 confrontation face-to-face with an ISIS solider won her the One World Media Award. Her debut book On the Front Line with the Women Who Fight Back, was released in 2018, drawing together the stories of the women she had met and interviewed.
Many more people came to know and appreciate her natural on-screen personality when she was crowned the winner of Strictly Come Dancing in 2018.
The same year, she was awarded an MBE for her services to broadcasting, in particular for giving voice to many of those who don’t have a voice in society.
