SVU Episode #13-8: Educated Guess

Synopsis: A patient in a mental ward opens a door and glimpses a woman being raped. SVU’s detectives find the woman matching the victim’s description: Gia is another patient on the mental ward, and she claims nothing happened. But our SVU detectives persist. They learn that Gia’s father had schizophrenia and was institutionalized when Gia was a girl. Mental illness runs in her family. Gia’s aunt and uncle supported Gia and her mother after Dad was gone; Gia’s mom basically became their servant.

Gia agrees to a sex kit, and semen is found inside her. But she still won’t say whose it is. The sex kit also reveals that Gia has vaginal scarring, which prompts Olivia to guess that Gia’s been raped for years. “Even if she was raped,” Amanda says, “who will believe her?”

“Which makes her the perfect target,” Olivia says.

Evidence points to a hospital guard who unwisely talks to the detectives while his union rep is there, but before his lawyer has arrived. (I don’t know any union rep who’d let that happen in real life.) The guard says, “I know the law – anyone at a mental institution isn’t capable of consent.” But then he goes on to admit that Gia asked him to get her a gun, and performed oral sex on him in return. “It wasn’t sex!”  The guard protests. “It was just a BJ!”

Turns out, Gia wanted the gun to protect herself from her uncle. He’s been molesting her for years, since her father went away. The fact that she was locked in a mental institution didn’t stop the uncle – he stole an employee ID badge, disguised himself in hospital scrubs to look like a doctor, and snuck into the building so he could rape her there.

Nick confronts the uncle, who claims that he and Gia have a longstanding consensual romantic relationship. Gia swears he’s lying. The detectives get a search warrant for the uncle’s home and find a box full of pictures of Gia as a naked, fourteen-year-old girl. They haul the uncle off to jail.  (They only mention assault charges, but I’m thinking they’ve got strong child porn charges, too.)

Verdict: B

What they got right:

Cases involving patients with severe mental illnesses are common, and, as this show portrayed, difficult to try. A mentally-ill victim might not be able to think in a linear way, tell a chronological story, or focus long enough to tell you everything that happened to them. Sexual predators know this, and prey upon the mentally ill.

The guard in this episode was right: patients in mental institutions aren’t legally capable of consent. Most jurisdictions (including NY and DC) have laws making it illegal for prison guards to have sex with prisoners, teachers to have sex with students, and mental-hospital employees to have sex with patients. There’s too much of a power differential. If you’re a prison guard, get a Match.com account, go to your local bar, or pretend you need help in the cookbook section of Barnes & Noble. But don’t mix it up with your clientele.

I had a case involving a prisoner in a jail, who claimed that a prison doctor performed oral sex on him during an exam. The prisoner had oozing penile sores, and it seemed unlikely that a doctor would want to put that in his mouth. But the detective diligently swabbed the prisoner’s penis, and DNA testing showed the doctor’s saliva there. I still remember what the victim said when asked why the doctor would do that to him: “It’s some fucked up people in this world.”

What they got wrong:

For a guy who was so smart about consent, tonight’s guard was really dumb about what constitutes a sex act. The fact that Gia performed oral sex on him, rather than the “traditional” kind, doesn’t change his criminal liability at all. He’s still going to jail.

Every victim on SVU has vaginal scarring.  In real life, it’s very rare; this is anatomy that can stretch to fit a baby.  I know I’ve said this before, but it continues to drive me nuts. This is a real problem that shows like SVU create for real sex-crimes prosecutors. In trials, I often had to put an anatomical expert on the witness stand just to explain the absence of intimate injuries. Jurors have been badly conditioned by TV crime dramas to expect them.

Uncle Scumbag isn’t going to break into a hospital to molest his niece. Sadly, I had uncle cases all the time. They usually involved a potbellied 45 year-old-uncle and a scared 13-year-old niece.  All of these assaults happened inside the home (his or hers). It’s a crime of opportunity.  An intra-family rapist usually won’t walk two blocks to perpetrate his assault, much less disguise himself, steal an ID badge, and break into a hospital to do it. In real life, this uncle would’ve stayed in his own living room and moved on to molesting his next niece or granddaughter.