New BBC3 documentary set to explore LGBT hate crimes in the United States

The three-part series Love and Hate Crime will look at the dangers facing those who are singled out as "different”, with a particular focus on those attacked because of their race or sexual orientation.

The first film in the series will look at the murder of a transgender woman by her boyfriend, who claimed the shock of finding out that his partner had been born male made him lose control and kill her.

Another will explore how the case of a young man from Texas, killed for being gay by his own boyfriend's family, has polarised a community.

The third film will explore how two white teenage girls from Mississippi on a night out ended up taking part in a notorious race hate killing.

All the films will interview police, prosecutors, perpetrators and those close to the victims.

The commission comes at a time when, as the BBC put it, “accusations of race prejudice are dominating the US political debate and the LGBT community is facing new state legislation aimed against it”.

The series was confirmed in the wake of the Orlando shooting, in which gunman Omar Mateen murdered 50 people at the gay nightclub Pulse in Florida, throwing the spotlight on hate crimes in the country.

The series is among a raft of new documentaries announced by the BBC ahead of this week’s Sheffield Documentary Festival.

BBC1 is making My Parent’s in Prison (working title), a one-off documentary following a group of children over the course of one summer whose parents are behind bars.

BBC2’s The Hospital: Life and Death in a Week (working title) is a six-part series going behind the scenes of one of London's biggest hospitals, the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

The channel has also given the green light to Sir Chris Hoy: From Velodrome to Le Mans (working title), telling the story of Britain’s most successful Olympic athlete of all time.

On BBC4, Surviving Aberfan will mark the 50^th anniversary of the Welsh disaster, when an avalanche of coal waste crashed into a school and houses of a South Wales mining village in a matter of minutes. A total of 116 children and 28 adults were killed in the disaster on 21 October 1966.

In the film, many survivors talk for the first time about the most harrowing day of their lives, and how they have lived with the memory for half a century.