CHICAGO — Last summer, federal prosecutors announced an investigation into the New York Police Department’s special victims division and its handling of sex abuse cases. The allegations include a decadelong history of “failing to conduct basic investigative steps and instead shaming and abusing survivors and re-traumatizing them during investigations.”
That’s the opposite of what we see on the NBC police drama “Law & Order: SVU,” now in its 24th season. Abusing survivors and retraumatizing them? Olivia Benson would never. Just last week, the fictional police captain played by Mariska Hargitay told a smirking young man accused of assaulting his girlfriend: “Think this is funny? SVU takes these kinds of allegations” — dramatic pause — “very seriously.”
The TV series is often lauded because it does take stories of domestic and sexual crimes seriously. Seeing that dramatized in a fictional context is one way to help the wider public understand how these abuses occur and why survivors are never to blame for the violence they’ve experienced.
