Worst TV Show of the Week Brought to you by the Parents Television Council WARNING: Graphic Content!!! Do NOT push play if you don't want to see the explicit video!!!

Law and Order: SVU on NBC

This week, the PTC released an eye-opening study, Women in Peril: A Look at TV's Disturbing New Storyline Trend, that documents the alarming rise in the victimization of women in the last five years of prime-time broadcast television.  The October 28^th episode of Law and Order: SVU (Wednesdays, 10:00 p.m. ET) exemplified this trend with a ghastly murder that involved the mutilation of a female victim.  For putting women in peril with yet another gratuitously violent storyline, Law and Order: SVU has been named the Worst TV Show of the Week. 

The SVU unit is called to a murder scene where a man and a woman have been brutally butchered; their bodies were displayed in a sexual manner.

Detective Olivia Benson surmises, “So the killer interrupted them while they were having sex.”

The medical examiner, Melinda Warner, points out, “But the blood splatter proves loverboy wasn’t on top of her when the perp sliced them up.” 

“So he posed them for shock value,” Detective Stabler chimes in.

Benson notices bloody incisions on the female victim’s chest and asks, “He mutilate her breasts before or after she died?” 

“After,” Warner determines.  “The pooled blood indicates her heart had stopped by the time he carved her up.  But she was alive when he cut her throat.  Won’t know if he raped her until the DNA comes back.”   

After the autopsy, Warner concludes that the victim’s breast implants were removed, perhaps as a trophy or to thwart identification via the serial numbers.  Along with the incisions on the victim’s breast, a heinous slash is shown across her throat. 

Once the male victim is identified as a member of a notorious Latino gang, the detectives begin to suspect that the female may have been a drug mule carrying narcotics across the border in her breast implants.

A federal agent, Porter, looks at the evidence and confirms a connection with Mexican drug cartels. “The coyotes who smuggle Mexican illegals into the country often gang-rape the women, then hang their victims’ panties on trees to symbolize their conquests.”  The victim’s underwear was similarly showcased and suggests that a rival gang committed the murders as part of a turf war.

A search of the female victim’s apartment leads the detectives to the airport where a drug shipment is set to arrive.  The bust, however, goes awry when a cartel henchman takes Benson hostage.  As is often the case with this show, tension is manufactured by putting women in danger.  The henchman leads Olivia through the airport with a gun pointed at her head until eventually Porter shots the henchman down.

As the PTC’s study noted, the prevalence of crime procedurals partially accounts for the rise in storylines that involve female victims.  Since SVU specializes in sex crimes, it makes sense that women are frequent targets.  But the study also questions whether so many depictions of female victimization are normalizing these acts of violence.  Unfortunately in the case of Law and Order: SVU, putting women in peril is the norm -- and for this, the program has rightfully been named Worst TV Show of the Week.