You can see him wondering if there is another woman out there he might have hurt without remembering. He must still come to terms with the fact that he had nights where he drank too much. Stone is acquitted of the charges after his friend confesses to the rape. The arc of this episode was rather heavy-handed, especially since there had been another man present during the alleged attack. It hints at some of the dynamics taking place behind the scenes in the #MeToo movement. Watching Benson and the team grapple with the fact that their trusted colleague might be a rapist was really eye-opening. His accuser can’t quite remember either, but she goes forward with her accusation. He denies it, but he had been drinking and can’t remember the events quite clearly. In episode 9, “Mea Culpa,” Benson’s ally and new district attorney Peter Stone (Phillip Winchester) is accused of rape. How many of them are likely in the hands of pedophile monsters or dead by the perverts’ hands? We need to keep talking about this. In reality, there are as many as 6,000 currently missing immigrant children. She still makes a statement many wish we could make about the despicable Nazi-reminiscent behavior by the Trump administration. This nightmare scenario culminates in Lieutenant Benson arresting the federal agent who ripped this girl from her mother. SVU 20 ’s third episode, “Zero Tolerance,” unpacked the consequences of the Trump regime’s child separation policy at the Mexican border when a 9-year-old Central American girl ends up in a sex trafficking ring in New York City.
SVU 20 even mentions now-infamous Judge Brett Kavanaugh by name in episode 8 “Hell’s Kitchen,” where a popular restaurant owner and his friend have a history of sexual predation dating back to high school. Over the years, the show has gone from original narratives with only a couple of real-events-based episodes each season to almost exclusively tailoring episodes around recent headlines. Like the Millenium Trilogy and other rape revenge narratives, SVU is healing. The outlier episodes, like those where the rapist or lawyer finds a way to get away with the crime, bring the justice fantasies of SVU back to Earth. This is a privilege that most sexual or gender-based violence survivors only dream about.
Most of the time, Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and her team put the sexual predators behind bars for long sentences. The idea of justice by proxy is appealing. As tough as the subject matter can be, the show is not only satisfying but also comforting. I haven’t been watching SVU for 20 years, but I have seen all the seasons and some of them multiple times (#BringBackStabler). We even got one of the rare outlier episodes where a mother is the perpetrator of horrific crimes against her children and husband, which are are among the most haunting of SVU ’s programming.
This season’s episodes have been particularly relevant, from the human trafficking of migrant and refugee children separated from their parents at America’s southern border to episodes focusing on aspects of the #MeToo movement. This season tackled the intersection of gender-based violence and toxic masculinity, as these devolve into a horrific mass school shooting. SVU has managed to cover many current news issues over the first 10 episodes. From it’s 20th season two-part opener, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit immediately set the stage for a real-life social-commentary-heavy season.