Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (Series). In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories. Like the original, the show features detectives investigating crimes and attorneys prosecuting the offenders. Changes in scene are marked by black screens stating the place and date, as well as the franchise's trademark . However, SVU focuses more on the detectives and less on the attorneys, whereas the original show usually shifts from the investigation to the prosecution at the halfway point.

A guide listing the titles and air dates for episodes of the TV series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (also known as Law & Order: SVU, or SVU) is an American drama television program about the Special Victims Unit in the fictitious. Episode Recap Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on TV.com. Watch Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes, get episode information, recaps and more.

The SVU detectives investigate sex crimes—usually rapes, rape- homicides, and various forms of child abuse. The voiceover at the beginning identifies such crimes as . Cragen from the original Law & Order and Det./Sgt. Munch from Homicide. There have been numerous Crossover events with the other Law & Order shows. SVU was retooled between the first and second seasons. The first season featured more of the characters' private lives, random courtroom scenes unrelated to the episodes' primary cases, and much brighter lit squadroom scenes.

Also, there were several recurring Assistant DA's instead of a regular character serving that function. Some early episodes did not feature a trial portion at all. At the start of the second season, ADA Cabot was assigned to the unit and the show began to more closely resemble the original Law & Order series.

The show is known for its dual- action It's Personal/Idiot Ball trope, in which each episode will usually feature one of the main detectives developing an extremely personal, unprofessional attachment or aversion to a victim or criminal, due to their personal history. This may sometimes cause them to follow false leads, or fall under suspicion and need to clear their name. These will manifest themselves in just about any episode that deals with crimes of a certain nature. Characters with . He also seems especially protective of younger people, willing to fight for them long after he would have moved on from any other case. Carisi: The falsely accused, corruption, use of religion to justify a crime.

This trope works backwards too; we learn more about the detectives by noticing what kinds of people they empathize with. When the usually cool attorney Casey Novak is uncharacteristically lenient to a young girl who committed vehicular manslaughter while off prescription medicine (thanks to following the advice of a popular artist who was against them, after his own tragic story), you later find out that, quite predictably, she has a personal history with mental illness—her ex- fianc.

The primary audience probably don't watch the original (we hope). Character Sheet can be found here. Not to be confused with the Special Vehicles Unit.

SVU is currently the only American Law & Order series still in active production, following the cancellation of Criminal Intent in 2. DOUM- DOUM    open/close all folders       A Abusive Parents: Several victims have these but the worst was probably in . She used the child's . Elliot is also implied to be one of these; he is, at the very least, neglectful and his wife has even left him at least once because of it. He apparently has not learned his lesson, as in the episode . He ends up getting shot by the smugglers and still refuses to go home and be with his wife and kids, instead going straight back to see the guys who just tried to kill him before he is healed.

As of the episode Turmoil, it can be confirmed that he is also volatile and borderline violent as he attacked his son after he pointed out his violent tendencies. Given that in an earlier episode, Ripped, we find out that Elliot's father was quite abusive himselfnote To be more specific, when Elliot was a little boy his father deliberately stomped on his diorama (which he and his father worked on) because he moved one of the trees and then called him weak (for crying about the stomped diorama) and a failure (something he apparently called him often)., it could be a case of it being In the Blood.

Benson's mother is described as having been a pretty mean drunk, among other things. In the same episode it's also implied that Rafael Barba's father was abusive as well. Watch The Whole Nine Yards Online Free 2016 here. Acquitted Too Late: The detectives of the SVU have a long and storied history when it comes to arresting the wrong person, making lots of public accusations regarding sex crimes, and then not even caring about the destruction they've caused to other people's lives. Season 2's . The staff shuttles her off to the side, and a suspect (who is on the sex offender registry as a pedophile) is later arrested. Turns out it's a scam to get money from the hotel, the supposedly under- age . Unfortunately, by the time anyone remembers that they have an innocent man in jail, the .

Fortunately, that made the woman and her accomplices legally culpable for murder. Disturbingly enough, Munch is the only one who is bothered by the suspect's death (as opposed to being glad the woman and her accomplices didn't get away) and takes the trouble of informing the dead man's ex- girlfriend (who, it turns out, was the same girl the suspect purportedly . In another episode, a young woman . In typical SVU fashion, it goes downhill from there, with the father being vilified as a monster by everyone, including the SVU department and his own family, culminating in the father being shot by his other daughterin a misguided attempt to protect her sister from him. Only then does the truth come to light, which is that the girl is actually a virgin, meaning no abuse could have taken place at all.

They are able to use this to get the psychiatrist arrested for malpractice. During the investigation into the kidnap/murder of a small boy, it turns out that the boy's coach is actually working under an assumed name, and has a sex offender record. Stabler and Benson immediately confront him publicly at his job and reveal his record, effectively ruining the man's life. Turns out not only did he not have anything to do with the murder of the boy, the . The detectives don't even apologize to the man.

A variation in an episode where they find out a man was wrongfully imprisoned and arrest the right man. Unfortunately, a hothead detective attacks and kills the real criminal, the only person who could exonerate the wrongfully accused man.

During an episode where a young girl is found to have been sexually abused, she eventually points the finger at her soccer coach who is also a close friend of her family. The man is taken into custody and held responsible for his actions but it's soon revealed that the only reason the girl accused him is because she was scared by the amount of pressure placed on her by the detectives. The episode ends with a Downer Ending for the originally accused man as he lost his job and will also never be able to apply to be a teacher ever again and is moving upstate with his family to his in- laws. One of the . It turns out the woman made up the story just to get back at him for giving her a bad review of her performance. The man at least gets the chance to chew out the cops and D. A. Rollins, too. Activist Fundamentalist Antics: In .

The police and everyone else stopped caring many years ago, so now he resorted to kidnapping and raping a woman just to get the police's attention. Oh, and the woman is of course in on it. Pulling off a little Romanticized Abuse show to the audience as her . In one particularly upsetting- for- grownups episode, a little boy goes missing at a birthday party and is found dead shortly afterward. The security tape from the party shows him holding a balloon as he walks out of the camera's viewpoint— only for the balloon to roll by it without the boy only seconds later. Watch It Follows Online Iflix.

The big kicker? He was killed by another child. An adult might have a healthy suspicion of other adults around their kids, but who would ever question another kid at a birthday party?

They arrive to find her so traumatized that she cannot even tell them her name. With the help of Detectives Odafin Tutuola and John Munch, they are able to identify the young victim. But they soon realize that her home life is far from normal as Dr. George Huang discovers that her mother suffers from a rare condition that renders her unable to recognize that the young girl is, in fact, her daughter. When the detectives find themselves without a lead, Erik Weber, a man they met on their previous case, decides to get involved.

But he may be overstepping his bounds.