Does Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Always Advocate for Victims? An Overview of Problematic Episodes
by Theo Alvarez
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is a cop show about victims of sexual assault and domestic abuse. It premiered 24 years ago, highlighting a subject that wasn’t much discussed then. While the show praises itself for being pro-victim, that isn’t always the case. This is not to say women and children are angels and would never harm men, but it’s essential to notice which kind of narratives are being told.
The world isn’t black and white. It’s not about one gender being better than the other. However, we know which people are usually the victims and which are the aggressors under patriarchy. As long as we live in a society where women are subjugated for simply being women, I will always stand by them and believe them.
Victim Blaming
Some episodes are concerning in Season 1. Firstly, in episode five, Olivia (Mariska Hargitay) blames the teenager, saying she is dating the man who sublets a room at her house and that she killed him. Suspecting that the girl killed the guy isn’t the problem (as it turns out, it’s true). However, the girl is just a teenager. Olivia says she’s only a child in age but acts like a woman. Thus, she is old enough to consent, and the relationship isn’t abusive.
It’s the same episode where Olivia tells Elliot (Christopher Meloni) that when she was 17, she dated an older man. I understand that in this case, Olivia is talking about being a victim of grooming, but that’s not how it reads at this point (in Season 23, there’s an episode about this that highlights the abuse). It feels like they’re saying it’s fine.
In episode 10, Cassidy (Dean Winters) doubts the victim. He tells Liv he was “just doing my job.” It’s not major, but it shows the start of a pattern throughout the show.
Locking Up Someone Before Committing a Crime
Apart from not believing victims, Season 1 has other problems. For example, the series wanting to lock a guy up for a sentence he already served in episode seven because of the recidivism rate with pedophiles. There is no proof this man was going to rape again. He served his sentence with good behavior, obeyed his parole duties and was psychotic during the act (which doesn’t diminish the victim’s trauma but goes to show he doesn’t usually have these kinds of feelings). Honestly, even if there were signs he would rape again, locking people up before they commit a crime is not the solution.
Season 2, Episode 7, is the first episode of domestic abuse. The victim is married to a cop, and the police have a hard time believing her. Apart from their loyalty to other cops before their loyalty to victims, they also don’t believe married women can be raped.
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There’s a line, “We marry IT just so we can have it available, so how do you rape a wife?” where a cop talks about the victim. The dehumanization of the victim by calling her “it” and the assumption that married women must give sex to their husbands is archaic and wrong. I understand this was 22 years ago, but it’s still a problem.
Fake Accusations
The next episode includes a fake accusation. They have many of these (at least one in most seasons). In this one, a 17-year-old claims to have been raped during a gala for the opening of a fancy hotel. It turns out she was after the money of the guy she’s accusing.
A show about believing victims should never make this a story. The whole episode plays right into the narrative of people who doubt survivors. It’s already a common excuse that women want money or to destroy a man’s reputation. I am not saying there aren’t circumstances where women lie, but it’s such a small percentage that it shouldn’t make the cut for a TV show like this, especially not while using the most common talk point of misogynists.
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Freud’s Theory of Psychoanalysis
The first episode of Season 3 already starts with a false allegation case. This time, an 18-year-old accuses her father of rape. However, her therapist creates false memories in her head. As a psychology student, this one pisses me off the most. Sigmund Freud first talks about the idea of false memories in his theory of psychoanalysis.
According to him, women create false memories of being assaulted by their fathers during childhood because of symptoms of repressed incest fantasies. This theory has been completely debunked, and there is a possibility that Freud knowingly ignored his patients’ claims of sexual abuse. It is believed it made him uneasy to name so many men as abusers, and instead, he started a theory that the women fantasized about it, which made him more comfortable.
He later identified the mother as the object of the seduction. Hence, the “Oedipal complex” came to fruition. (Read “The Sexual Abuse of Children: A Feminist Point of View,” aka The Freudian Coverup by Florence Rush). Freud’s work, although important at the time, is not a science, and there are a lot of points that have been refuted, including this one.
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Making an episode based on a premise that has long been deemed false is ridiculous and shows a lack of research. It completely undermines psychologists’ work, testimony and professional reports during a trial.
Male Victims
In Season 3, Episode 10, the first male victim appears. None of the men on the squad, including Elliot, believe him. Three women raped him at a bachelorette party. While rare, male victims of women rapists exist, and attention should be drawn to it. It is a shame he is not believed at first.
Season 5 has two false allegation cases. The first is episode 11. A convicted pedophile, Baxter (Stephen Lang), escapes prison so he can prove his innocence by kidnapping his accuser, Lee (Milo Ventimiglia), to force him to recant his story. As it turns out, the kid (now a teenager) lied. He was raped, but not by his stepdad. He accused Baxter because he didn’t like his mom having a boyfriend.
It seems Lee was afraid to name the person who actually raped him, which is understandable, but he used a bad situation to get rid of an adult he didn’t like. I don’t think things are so black and white. Lee isn’t a person without a heart, as his mom says. He was just a child, but it does give a bad reputation to children who come forward with their testimony, which is already deemed non-reliable by so many people.
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Child Cases
In episode 19, a 12-year-old is arrested for posting disturbing rape and murder threats online. When the police psychologist, Dr. Huang (BD Wong), interviews him, he says he has been sexually assaulted by a millionaire named Tripley (Will Keenan), claiming his parents were paid to keep quiet. He loves kids and constantly gives money to charities and struggling parents. The prosecution has a hard time with the indictment because the kid recants the story in a video. The parent doesn’t want their child to give testimony so he won’t lose the millions from an NDA.
However, another child comes forward — a girl. She has leukemia and is willing to come forward, but as it turns out, April (Madeleine Martin) is lying. Her grandmother persuaded her to lie to get a settlement. Not only this, but the grandmother has been poisoning the child with mercury to fake symptoms of cancer and scam people. The Munchausen by proxy plot is so tiring.
Once again, the charges against Tripley are dropped. However, it’s unclear if the first child that came forward was telling the truth. Tripley celebrates by having a huge party for children and invites the press. It feels like he’s getting away with child molestation; it doesn’t feel like he’s innocent at all. The second child was only after his money, but what about the first?
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Season 6, Episode 5, scared me into thinking it was another false allegation case. Olivia believes the victim, even when she herself says she is lying. The ending is ambiguous because the perpetrator is found innocent, but I still believe her. I also like that it seems she inspired another victim to come forward, and SVU will prosecute it. This is the Olivia I love. Both this season and the next don’t have false allegation cases, and the cops mostly believe victims.
Sexual Abuse
In episode 11, after a car accident, a little girl is discovered to have been sexually abused. She accuses her PE teacher; however, it turns out she’s lying. She was abused, but not by him. The girl comes forward after and accuses the right person, but not before her teacher loses his job.
Again, it’s an episode where kids are seen as distrustful — they “lie” about assault. I don’t think the girl is to blame; she was still processing what happened to her and was afraid to tell the truth. However, this show deals with the consequences of false accusations and shows his life being destroyed. Honestly, that’s not what happens in real life. Rapists are not convicted all the time. Known rapists still have jobs and are adored by many without any consequences.
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Misogyny and Discrediting Victims
In Season 8, Episode 11, Valerie (Michael Michele) accuses her estranged husband, Miles (Blair Underwood), of breaking into her home and raping her. Olivia believes her, but Elliot doesn’t. There’s a dividing line between detectives in the squad room, as Miles has no history of violence. Valerie doesn’t want to use her daughter as a witness, so there is no evidence. Miles is soon released. Olivia remains convinced Valerie is in danger, while Elliot says it’s a case of a wife crying foul to punish her soon-to-be ex-husband. Olivia’s concerns are proven right when Miles sets his wife on fire.
As it turns out, Valerie was, lying about the rape, but it doesn’t justify her husband retaliating by burning her. I don’t understand why the show plays into these common narratives of misogynists who do everything to discredit victims. Why would they give red pills a platform to say women lie to get back at their husbands and destroy their lives? That’s exactly what they want, and a show that prides itself on being pro-victim shouldn’t give them reasons to discredit women.
Dissociative Identity Disorder
The first episode of Season 9 is a dissociative identity disorder episode. It’s very interesting until almost the end when we learn the woman is lying. I don’t know why writers don’t see DID as a real disorder. Every piece of media I’ve seen where people claim to have this, it’s later shown they’re lying. It’s a tiring, overused trope. It doesn’t do any good to people with mental illness to be disbelieved. The SVU writers have a lot to learn if they want to talk about people with mental disorders.
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Season 11 has a false allegation case in episode three. I’m tired of false allegation cases by this point. A woman pretending to have been kidnapped? Don’t these writers have anything better to do? Then, the man accused of doing it (before they realize the woman is lying) almost kills Elliot, and a real crime is committed.
Upholding Harmful Narratives
In Season 13, after Elliot leaves, things start to get worse. A man witnesses his wife being kidnapped via video chat in episode 18. When they go to her hotel room, cameras show what appears as her being raped. However, the investigation reveals the victim trying to pick up the ransom money herself.
As it turns out, the wife is having an affair, and what’s seen on camera is her having violent sex with her lover. She faked the abduction for money. However, her co-conspirator still goes to jail when she’s found not guilty. It’s sick that a woman would fake being raped to get money from her husband. It plays into the “all women are gold diggers” false narrative.
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Apart from all the trauma inflicted on Olivia, there are also false allegation cases in Season 15. In episode seven, a four-year-old boy claims he’s been sexually abused by his former music teacher, Jackie (Billy Porter). However, there is no evidence. It’s manufactured by the sister of the victim and her friend, Brooke (Hana Hayes) and Rachel (Kara Hayward), who coached the child to say the teacher used a vibrator on him and several other kids.
Jackie is gay, and the episode plays into a common conservative trope that all gays are pedophiles. The girls were after retribution because Jackie dropped them as a coach after he realized they couldn’t cut it as singers. The crazy thing is they’re just teenagers, and it seems like an elaborate plot for them to forge.
Not only this but apparently, Brooke gets the idea after her parents separated. Her mom used to make several false claims against her father. Again, this falsely claims women are evil. This is a case where the man’s life has been destroyed because gay people are already believed to be molesters.
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Rape Allegations
Season 16, Episode 2, has another false allegation case. A basketball superstar endures rash rape allegations brought on by representatives of a high-profile clothing line soon after he announced a partnership with them. It seems like all the women accusing him received suspicious pay bonuses around the time the allegations were made. It turns out the allegations are false. The good thing is that Olivia believes the victims until the end. She proved to be a victim’s ally.
In Season 18, Episode 10, a son interrupts his mother “being raped” by a 15-year-old (who turns out to be the son’s best friend). He shoots the “rapist,” only later to find out they were having an affair, and the actual pervert is the mother. Of course, she’s a psychiatrist because all psychiatrists are weird in this show. It’s not the usual false allegation case because the mom is a predator, but it’s still worth mentioning.
The last episode I want to discuss is Season 23, Episode 21. In this episode, a person from Olivia’s past reemerges, and she has to deal with yet another trauma. This is a continuation of Season 1, Episode 5, where Olivia says she had an older boyfriend when she was 17. I like getting to see more of Olivia’s personal life and past.
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I am not primarily against unearthing this story. It’s good that, as a victim advocate, Olivia doesn’t think teenagers are old enough to consent to relationships with much older adults. It’s alarming that she’s not aware of grooming until now. However, it feels like it was meant to only further traumatize Olivia on top of everything she’s been through.
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit drops new episodes every Thursday at 9/8c on NBC.
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