Monday 15 November
Monday 22 November
Monday 29 November
A second series of Sleeping with the Enemy for Radio 4. Untold stories from around the world... of love, death, betrayal and sexual exploitation, all revealed through personal testimony.
Programme 1 - Partition - 15 November 2004 Producer: Tanya Datta Presenter: Linda Pressly
In the bloody carnage that accompanied the Partition of India in 1947, women - Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims - were the most vulnerable. As the entire region of Punjab fragmented along religious lines, women were abducted in their thousands by the 'enemy' community. Many others endured extreme forms of sexual violence.
Scores of women committed suicide or were killed by their own menfolk to stop themselves from falling into enemy hands.
During this period, so many women disappeared that the newly formed governments of India and Pakistan were compelled to act. They formed official 'recovery' departments to bring their women back...sometimes with even more tragic consequences.
Sleeping With The Enemy tells the story of Ranjit Kaur, a Muslim woman who survived a massacre and was then claimed by a Sikh man who married her. She was 10 years old.
To prevent such perceived 'dishonour', Bir Bahadur Singh, a Sikh man, relates how he watched his father publicly behead his teenage sister - along with 25 other female members of their family - in front of a Muslim mob. Listen to this edition
Programme 2 - Sexpionage - 22 November 2004 Producer/presenter: Linda Pressly
In the 1970s espionage and counter-espionage were accepted as a means of ensuring national security. The Cold War continued, and there was everything to play for. No means of getting information were eschewed, and sex was good currency. In that climate, the KGB and the Stasi institutionalised the use of seduction to devastating effect.
Sleeping with the Enemy tells the story of the KGB's 'Agent Scot' - a former Metropolitan police officer who, for eight years, travelled the globe befriending and seducing women potentially of use to Soviet intelligence.
Meanwhile in West Germany, Gabriella Kliem - a secretary at the American Embassy in Bonn - had met the love of her life. Over a period of years, she photographed hundreds of secret documents for the charming man who became her fiance. She never knew, she says, that he was a Stasi 'romeo' spy with a wife back in East Germany. Listen to this edition
Programme 3 - Drovers' Boys - 29 November 2004 Producer: Tanya Datta Presenter: Linda Pressly
Up to the 1950s, cohabitation between Aboriginal Australians and white Australians was not only abhorred by polite society, it was deemed a criminal offence. But in the brutal cattle country of the Northern Territories, needs must so the law was ignored.
Aboriginal women were taken by force or acquired through mercenary arrangements with their badly impoverished communities.
On these remote cattle stations, the women served a dual purpose: used both as sexual chattels as well as manual workers. Many of them were disguised as men to evade the authorities. And interestingly, in a region which saw the largest movement of cattle ever known in the world, some of these women became more competent at cattle droving than their white male counterparts. They're now known locally as the Drovers' Boys.
Sleeping With The Enemy goes deep into the Australian Outback to explore the story of those violent and exploitative times. There's Nancy, an Aboriginal woman, who remembers her mother being forced by her husband to spend each afternoon with a white man in exchange for a stick of tobacco. And Corby, a former drover and a white man, who admits that contrary to what was expected, all his white peers from his bosses downwards were secretly sleeping with Aboriginal women - including himself. Listen to this edition
