In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. But what is Law and Order: Special Victims' Unit--everyone's favorite show about sex crimes and probably American pop culture's most significant source of information on violence against women--really telling us about rape, domestic violence, sexual assault and sexual harassment?
Like many people, I am addicted to this masterpiece of melodrama despite significant misgivings about how the writers choose to deal with the terrible stories they tell each week. Since getting sucked into my first million-episode marathon as a teenager, I've become a passionate feminist, a volunteer worker at my friendly neighborhood rape crisis center, and a woman with some creepy experiences of my own. As these things have broadened my perspective, my fascination with the show has only grown.
The more aware I become of the dismissive, victim-blaming, perp-excusing attitudes about rape that largely persist in our society, the more I notice them in the media at large and in Law and Order's last surviving spinoff. The show sometimes reinforces deeply ingrained ideas about bad girls who deserve what they get, accused rapists who are the REAL victims here, domestic violence being a two-way street, and acquaintance rape being really not that much of a thing. It also sets off all sorts of bombs in the minefield that is the intricate intersection between abuse and the politics of class, race, and gender.
This isn't unusual--examples of the same abound in movies, music, and our actual headlines. But few of those other outlets address sexual violence perpetually, constantly, on a weekly basis. Few of them were created to address it. Not only is SVU about sex crimes, but at the most basic level, according to the title itself, it's supposed to be about a unit that helps and protects these very special victims. Wrap archaic beliefs about rape in that package and you get a complex case of cognitive dissonance that begs for deconstruction.
So I figured I might as well write about it.
