FRONTLINE Wins Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for “Rape in the Fields”

Rape in the Fields — FRONTLINE’s collaborative investigation of the hidden reality of rape on the job for undocumented women working in America’s farms, fields and factories — has won the 2014 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for domestic television.

Led by correspondent Lowell Bergman, the 2013 investigation uncovered the steep price that many undocumented women are forced to pay in order to keep their jobs and provide for their families.

“These women live in fear, but they were willing to go on camera to tell their stories at great personal risk,” said Bergman. “They didn’t want to see it happening to other women.”

The year-long investigation was a collaboration between FRONTLINE, the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Spanish-language network Univision, which aired a Spanish-language version of the film, Violación de un Sueño.

“It was an inspiring breakthrough moment for us,” said FRONTLINE Deputy Executive Producer Raney Aronson-Rath. “The journalism was so strong, the audience was new to us, and the collaboration was multi-platform in the truest sense.”

The Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards recognize outstanding reporting on human rights and social justice issues. You can read a full listing of the 2014 award recipients here, and you can watch our winning film — which was also honored with a duPont-Columbia award earlier this year — below.