I have a love/hate relationship with Olivia Benson and the ubiquitous Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU to those of us who have it on the background at least 65 percent of the time). On one hand, it’s copaganda of the highest order, where police are nearly always the good guys, and one cop in particular, Olivia Benson, played by Mariska Hargitay, is the ultimate victims’ advocate. The SVU team will stop at nothing until justice has been meted out, whether that means a sex offender winds up in prison or that a victim simply gets to look her rapist in the eye and accuse him in public. There is almost always closure for victims in SVU, which is a far cry from how the system handles sexual assaults in real life. This is where, for disclosure’s sake, I tell you that I never reported my sexual assault.

But I do appreciate some of the education that show has done of the general public, taking down old tropes like “women only accuse rich and powerful men for money,” “we were both drunk so it’s not rape,” and “if she really didn’t want it, she would have fought harder.” For all its faults, the show does a good job, I think, of showing how a case gets to prosecution and, more importantly, why certain cases don’t get prosecuted, even if it’s fairly clear that a crime has been committed. In large part, it’s all still about what prejudices the jury brings to viewing the victim, which has led to some good discussions about why a victim not only has to lay her own pain bare for...

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