A couple of years ago I mostly stopped watching crime-based TV, whether true crime or fictionalised.
Having spent years living on a diet of Criminal Minds and CSI and every other show in the genre, as well as true crime documentaries galore, I began to feel some discomfort with the ethics of a lot of crime content.
Since then, I’ve occasionally indulged, but most of my viewing has shifted to other things.
I think part of my obsession with crime shows was, like for many women, a sense that the more we know, the more prepared we can be for the threats that surround us. If I watch 800 permutations of rape and murder, I may be able to avoid it myself.
Part of my obsession was that, gruesome and lurid as those shows often are, they are also sanitised in the sense that they are fiction, and the crimes are often neatly tied up at the end of the hour.
But also, I loved these shows because they are often just brilliantly compelling viewing.
Then I stopped, and I think it’s been healthier for me to be choosing to consume less horrific violence and assault.
Recently, though, I have tentatively returned to an old favourite. It feels weird to call SVU – full name Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – comfort viewing, but it often felt like it was.
Revisiting it after a long gap is helping me to understand why: it’s because we all need Olivia Benson to be real.
Like all these cop shows, SVU is copaganda, and it is profoundly, depressingly unrealistic to portray a police department, even (or especially) one that specialises in sex crimes, as consistently helpful, determined, and resistant to rape myths and rape culture.
But we want it to be true, we need it to be true, and Benson, played by the formidable Mariska Hargitay, epitomises everything survivors need not just in coppers, but in the world.
She will fight your corner, she will defend you, she will bend over backwards to make sure you are ok, and she will make sure everyone else in her orbit does the same.
She’s fucking incredible.
Hargitay, the actor who plays Olivia Benson, is no less remarkable. Alarmed by how many letters she got from survivors when she started playing Benson in 1999 that she started her own foundation, the Joyful Heart Foundation, to support survivors and campaign and fundraise to get rape kits tested.
At a time when, in the UK, rape and sexual offences are being discussed on every news channel and on every podcast, this is a difficult time for many survivors.
Celebrities being convicted is gratifying and must be a gigantic relief and validation for those who were mighty enough to report, to testify, and to tolerate all the awfulness in between. But the constant media discourse is triggering, exhausting and kind of soul-destroying.
The personal is political, and the political is personal. These are important “issues”, but they are not just abstract issues; humans are at the heart of every one of the complaints that has been upheld, and every one of the many, many, many, many thousands where survivors do not get justice.
We want Benson to be the cop in charge when we report. We want Hargitay to be our best friend. Neither of those are likely to happen.
I’m jaded, but with good reason. Even so, sometimes we need to spend an hour pretending that it could be true. That we could talk to respectful police officers, who would help and encourage us, that we could deal with a legal system that does not destroy us, and that we could get justice.
Most of us won’t get any of that. But on Channel 5 for an hour a week, we are allowed to imagine the parallel universe where we might. And that is the best many of us will get.
Image: Colleen Sturtevant