Tonight’s SVU did something only this show can: it entertained and riveted, while teaching about a horrific American problem. In this gut-wrenching episode, SVU cast a light on the real-life tragedy of “rehoming”: the practice of giving up adopted kids via Internet chat rooms, and the abuse that flourishes in this blackmarket of thrown-away children.

Recap:

The SVU detectives are called into a home when it appears that a child has been abducted. In fact, the 7-year-old boy was given up by his mother, without the father’s knowledge. The couple had adopted him from former Soviet state of Georgia, only to learn that he had serious developmental and social problems.

Mom couldn’t take it, so she went to a chat room and met a well-meaning but ditzy middleman who took the child, then promptly gave him to a couple with a false address and a forged home-study. The new family turns out to be pornographers who took the boy to use in their child porn videos.

Olivia and her team eventually track them down to a cheap motel, where they save the boy and three little girls. In the motel room, they also find an infant baby. The infant is unclaimed and sent into the foster care system.

Olivia, who spent a large part of this episode in an exciting but ultimately anticlimactic pregnancy head-fake, looks longingly at the baby as her biological clock ticks ominously in the background.

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If Shakespeare wrote about sex crimes in New York … the result probably wouldn’t look like tonight’s SVU episode. This thug was no Romeo. Nevertheless, “Betrayal’s Climax” was a powerful episode, illuminating the tragic consequences of modern gang violence, misogyny, and misguided codes of honor.

Recap:

Olivia is promoted! During a beautiful ceremony, tears well up in the characters’ collective eyes (mine too). Congratulations, Sgt. Benson. After fifteen years of compassionate and dedicated service, you deserve this.

Meanwhile, 16-year-old Avery lives in a posh brownstone on the Upper West Side and paints happy portraits of lovers holding hands. She’s madly in love with her Hispanic boyfriend, Manny, who lives in the projects and is trying to save money to buy his dead brother a tombstone. Avery’s patrician parents, of course, disapprove. This disapproval grows just a tad when a study-date at Avery’s house turns into a gang-rape, where three members of the notorious BX-9 gang hold a gun to Manny’s head while brutalizing Avery on her parents’ 600-threadcount Egyptian cotton sheets.

Turns out, Manny was a recent BX-9 recruit. Immediately before the assault, his friends called to say they were coming over to Avery’s house to “party,” and he knew what that meant. Raping Avery was the gang’s way of punishing Manny for botching the robbery of a pharmacy a few weeks back.

But guess who feels worse than Manny? Poor bruised Avery, who experienced orgasms during the rape, while Manny watched. She never came with Manny – [Read more…]