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Of course, the only member of the Rangers we saw besides Captain Williams herself was her commanding officer, and it would have been equally cliche for him to be going around sexually assaulting the women under his command. In this case, it's doubly disappointing because there are so many issues around rape in the military that just weren't addressed.
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SVU is generally better than this, giving viewers insights into the causes and conequences of sexual assault rather than conforming to stereotypes. Not only is it cliche for a jilted lover to turn into a rapist, but it also conflates rape - which is a crime of power - with sexual desire. I'm not a fan of those kinds of stories to begin with. Instead of delving into the issue of sexual assault in the military, SVU chose to give viewers a run-of-the-mill rejected lover loses control type of story. That's one of the reasons I'm so disappointed that it turned out that Williams' ex-fiance was the culprit. In the past few years, there have been more and more reports of sexual assault within the military, so exploring how one such soldier deals with it, along with the culture of silence around it, was potentially powerful. The question of how female soldiers deal with sexual assault is an important and interesting one. Was he a Ranger too who felt he had to give her respect even though he thought she was anything but respectable? Or was that just a random plot point so that viewers could think for a minute that he raped Williams and then realized he didn't?Īll of these unanswered questions weakened what could have been one of the strongest episodes of the season. I'm not sure why he shook hands with Williams, who he clearly didn't respect at all.
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Top suspect Gary Cook also seemed a bit like a token misogynist here. Perhaps she was meant for nobler purposes.Ĭook: It's been that way for hundreds of years. Like, perhaps it is not in God's plan for a woman to be boxing in a warehouse at 4 in the morning. It seemed really pointless to even mention that Fin was a Ranger too if it was going to be meaningless.Ĭook: Will you take the blue pill of political correctness or the red pill?Ĭook: Truth. None of that was explored, and that's a shame, because there was so much potential here that wasn't used. He might have been a better person to forge a connection with Williams than Olivia, since he had been in the Rangers and she hadn't. He might have felt protective of the Rangers or understanding of the commanding officer's attitude. There might have been attitudes or behavior towards women in his unit that he felt bad about now that he saw this woman had been raped. I'd have loved to know how Fin felt about this whole thing. That detail of his backstory didn't really play into anything, other than a 30 second conversation in which he tried to convince Williams to stay in the hospital by referencing it. I also thought more should have been made out of Fin having been a Ranger too. Some more conflict between the cops and the Army brass would have added to the drama here it also might have been helpful to see Williams interact with others in her unit after the rape.īenson: Don't you find it odd that she didn't even ask us Cook's name? She didn't even want to know if we were going to arrest her?įin: If she asked about her assailant, that would mean admitting that she let it happen. Her commanding officer wanted to keep her name out of the press, but things were surprisingly civil between him and SVU. I was curious as to how much of this came from the culture she was immersed in. Williams clearly was using her position in the Army to hide from the fact that she had been raped in addition to taking an attitude that real soldiers don't get sexually assaulted. And in my experience, that's the only way to get closure.īeth: Soldiers don't need closure. I'm flying out tonight.īenson: I thought you were going to stay two weeks for your mother.īenson: Why don't you take a couple more days? That would allow us to find your assailant and put him behind bars and give you the chance to heal. On at least three separate occasions, she told Olivia that she had allowed herself to be raped and was no longer a role model for young girls.īeth: I've been called back to base.
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Captain Williams was so convinced that her rape was her fault that it didn't seem like Olivia would ever get through to her.