Law And Order SVU / Tropes G to P

A - F | G - P | Q - Z

Back to Main.

---

G

• The Gambling Addict: Rollins, apparently, as of "Home Invasions." She confesses this to Cragen, and is getting help.
• Gamer Chick: Partially deconstructed in "Bullseye", although there turns out to be more to the story. The detectives learn a young girl had been forced to live in a cupboard under the stairs and almost starved to death due to her mother and stepfather being total game addicts, more concerned about their kid in a video game than the actual living child in the home. However, the mother's situation turns out to be about more than game addiction: she is suffering from Capgras delusion, which makes her think that her daughter has been replaced by an imposter, so she legitimately doesn't realize she's neglecting her child, instead thinking she's just ignoring the "imposter" (and the one time she's able to speak to her daughter without the delusion kicking in, she clearly does care a lot about her). The real villain is the stepfather, who is in his right mind and knows full well who the girl is, but is just completely unconcerned.
  • The focus of "Intimidation Game".
• Gaslighting: This occurs in "Girl Dishonored" where a rape victim was gaslit by her entire campus. They failed to support her emotionally, insisted that she was to blame for the rape, and never confronted the boy responsible for the rape. It was so bad that her depression became progressively worse and she agreed to EST after her campus had her committed.
• Gay Cruising: In "Blood Brothers," the detectives meet a gay man named Chase who found Tripp's card and used it while hooking up with guys at a club near Central Park.
• Gender Bender Angst: One case was based on David Reimer, where like him an infant boy lost his penis in a botched circumcision and given a sex reassignment afterward then raised as a girl. The "sister" involuntarily given a sex reassignment identified as a boy. With his twin brother he got revenge by murdering the doctor who did it.
• Genre Blindness: You'd think that the detectives would eventually figure out that the first suspect they nab and harangue in interrogate is almost never the actual culprit, especially if they're also telling them what their motives are and how they did it.
• Glamorous Single Mother: "Responsible" features a deconstruction of one. Becca's mom Lillian is a beautiful woman (especially for her age), lives in a nice fancy house, and is the "cool mom" who not only lets her daughter's friends drink alcohol, but provides them with it. She's also sleeping with Jordan (who is underage), provided the booze for the party where the Victim of the Week died, and her allowing Becca to drink starting from when she was 12 has given her liver and brain damage.
• Golf Clubbing: "Lead"
• Go Mad from the Isolation: This was the heart of the episode "Solitary": a criminal Elliot arrested earlier in his career spent the majority of his incarceration in solitary confinement, which ate away at his sanity and, when Elliot went to apologize for suspecting him of murder, caused him to throw Elliot off a roof in fear of being locked back up in the hole. Later, during the trial, when the criminal described the hellish experience he had in solitaire, Elliot decided to see what it was like for himself. After spending just one weekend in the hole, he suffered from a lack of sleep and a loss of his sense of time, gaining him sympathy for the criminal. Later he insured that the criminal wouldn't be held in solitary again during his sentence.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: Has been subverted, averted and played straight at various points through the series. It also gets lampshaded on multiple occasions. Justified, because cops actually do use this technique in real life, though less blatantly.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion:
  • In "Persona" Linnie/Caroline admits to having an abortion in the 70s after getting pregnant due to being repeatedly raped by her then-husband (whom she killed to stop the abuse). Her original plan was to strike a deal with Donnelly to plead guilty in exchange for being allowed to get an abortion, but she was intimidated by Donnelly and (possibly because of this trope) couldn't bring herself to ask, so instead she escaped and got the abortion after assuming a new identity.
  • In "Dearly Beloved" Kitty became pregnant by her rapist, and thus wants to have an abortion initially as a result. Olivia has mixed feelings about it due to having been conceived by rape herself, as it brings up bad memories about her mother telling saying she shouldn't have kept her. In the end though Kitty decides to go through with the pregnancy. Olivia lets Amanda think that she had an abortion once in the past and regretted it too, but then says that didn't happen the next episode.
  • Another victim who was impregnated on orders of her father (not by: he was running something of a one-man Breeding Cult) tells Elliot after her father is convicted that she plans to abort. Elliot expresses no specific opinion, and roll credits.
  • In "Babes", an episode involving a pregnancy pact, Elliot admits that he's personally opposed to abortion, at least when the pregnancy is the result of consensual sex (he specifically cites the sex being consensual as a reason he thinks abortion would be the wrong choice in this case). However, he doesn't let this affect how he does his job.
• Gory Discretion Shot: In “Svengali”, When investigators find a woman's chopped-off and buried breasts the camera pans up as the box is opened, so all we see is the disgusted reaction of the investigator.
  • Also, "Mercy" opened with two guys finding a drowned baby in a cooler.
  • Happens to Fin in "Denial" where he finds a child's remains in a garbage bag in a dumpster. The viewer only sees Fin recoil in shock and dry-heave before confirming the presence of the body over his radio.
  • And in "Born Psychopath" where a young psychopath has drowned his neighbor's dog.
• Groin Attack: In the Season 11 episode "Hardwired", Elliot gets kicked in the groin by a grade school kid. Fortunately, he recovers and quips, "I know why they're called special victims."
• Gray-and-Grey Morality: Utilized to the hilt in the episode "Doubt", which highlighted the main reasons as to why so many rape cases boil down to "He Said, She Said". The woman claimed her ex-boyfriend (and former professor) had raped her, while he claimed that it was consensual. Complicating this is the victim's claim that Stabler had sexually assaulted her while escorting her home (he caught her when she'd stumbled), and one of her other ex-boyfriends stating that she was into rough sex, up to and including choking. The episode ends with "We, the jury, find the defendant...", Fade to Black, leaving viewers to form their own opinions.
• Guilt Complex: "Mask" introduces Captain Jackson, a psychiatrist who is looking for a way to cure sexual addiction. This came about from an unfortunate summer where he believes he may have raped his lesbian daughter, prompting the two to become estranged, but can't remember due to his own struggles with sex and alcohol addiction at the time. As it turned out, he actually had consensual sex with his daughter's best friend; the estrangement was because his daughter was in love with her friend and was extremely hurt that her father would take away her first love like that.

H

• Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook: This is the message of the episode "Making A Rapist". A man wrongly convicted of rape is released after serving sixteen years in prison. After making friends with the woman formerly believed to be his victim, he's accused of her daughter's rape and murder. It turns out he did do it: after years of rape and beatings by fellow prisoners, when the daughter laughed off his Love Confession, he (while drunk) flew into a rage.
• Halfway Plot Switch: Done more each season.
  • For the last three or four seasons, it is rare to find an episode where what appears to be happening in the cold open is at all related to the rest of the episode.
• Hate Crimes Are a Special Kind of Evil: One episode saw a gay man raping, robbing, assaulting and eventually murdering other gay men. ADA Barba sought a hate crimes enhancement. The perp's lawyer argued that her client could not be charged as he was a member of the group he supposedly hated. Barba claimed that her client hated a specific subset of gays, those who could pass as straight when her client could not.
• Harmful to Minors: The unit has to deal with cases like this quite regularly.
  • In "Friending Emily" they meet an FBI agent whose only job is to monitor child porn. He may or may not be joking that his predecessor ate his gun at his desk.
• Hello, Attorney!: All the ADAs qualify, but Alexandra Cabot in particular. Diane Neal (Casey Novak) is a bit more tomboyish but also extremely attractive, though, and then there's Raúl Esparza's Rafael Barba....
• Headphones Equal Isolation: When Elliot and Olivia walked in on a suspect who was listening to his stereo via headphones, Elliot gets his attention by turning the volume up.
• Held Gaze: Barba and Benson do a lot of long, lingering held gazes, even when they're professionally at odds. Perhaps not coincidentally, Mariska Hargitay and Raúl Esparza ship their characters in real life.
• Heroic Dog:
  • "Liberties" had a victim's dog bite her abusive ex who was choking and threatening her.
  • "Pattern Seventeen" had a twelve year old girl narrowly escape being raped, because her dog bit the perp and wouldn't let go. The dog was making so much noise that the perp quickly realized it wasn't worth it.
• Heteronormative Crusader: SVU often play with this trope, with detectives reminding themselves and each other that bruises aren't necessarily caused by abuse, they could also be caused by BDSM. In some episodes, the trope is played completely straight.
  • In "Closet", a homosexual suspect named Lincoln Haver gets his football career destroyed because he was surrounded by homophobes and Olivia accidentally outed him. However, it turns out Olivia's accidental reveal of the suspect's orientation wasn't the problem; the person who outed Haver was the real murderer, the manager of the football team, who had caught Haver kissing his boyfriend, and had outed him to make both Haver and Olivia look bad.
  • In "Tortured", a shoe fetishist kills a woman for her boots. Dr. Huang insists that fetishism is a harmless sexual variation, and a very tragic story is gradually revealed. It turns out that the murderer's mother hated her son for being sexually "abnormal". She tried to "cure" his fetishism by beating him in the head with frying pans and other hard objects, and eventually this abuse caused him permanent brain damage that made him unstable enough to kill a woman by mistake.
  • A nice aversion occurs in the episode "Strange Beauty," which centers around people into body modification and mutilation. The detectives are a little nonplussed by some aspects of the subculture, but they only get judgmental with people who are breaking actual laws.
  • Stabler was a borderline case of this in later seasons. See "Liberties."
• Hidden Depths: The badass undercover FBI Agent played by Marcia Gay Harden is also a Happily Married mother of two and lives in the girliest apartment ever seen in the series.
• Hidden Wire: Goes horrifyingly wrong in "Folly" when a male victim agrees to wear a wire to get a confession out of his madam/the perp. She's making dinner while they talk, and when she discovers the wire she flies into a rage. The detectives, listening in, suddenly hear him screaming in agony and barge in to discover she'd thrown a huge pot of boiling pasta water all over him. In what is perhaps a Continuity Nod, Amaro gets shot down hard by Cabot in his first episode when he suggests using a wire to catch a suspect.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In "P.C.", Babs Duffy's coming out as bisexual might not have been taken so badly by her group if she hadn't been so militant about her group centering only lesbians.
• Holier Than Thou: See Strawman Has a Point. The detectives can be extremely judgmental and close-minded on sexuality, to the point that even perfectly normal fetishes are demonized, and any other branch of law enforcement that has their hands in their case just complicates matters and has no regard for justice. For example:
  • "Clock" features a girl who looked like a child even though she was seventeen, and her boyfriend was a convicted pedophile. The detectives were disgusted with this relationship, feeling it was unhealthy and that his only interest in her was due to her looking like a child — however, even if that is in fact the case, the fact remains that the girl is over the age of consent, so she has the right to decide that she wants to be in a relationship with him regardless of what his reasons for choosing her may be.
  • As for the Jurisdiction Friction, the detectives often jeopardize investigations being conducted by other departments to further their own, even when the other department's investigation is far more important. Many times their suspects are agents working for the FBI or some other higher branch of authority, and the detectives refuse to back off and often force the other agency to include them. This rarely, if ever, goes well.
    • At the same time, when another branch of New York police are assigned to help SVU with their current case, the squad's first instinct is to box them out and handle it themselves.
• Hollywood Law: A common example throughout the series is Olivia's constant assertion that their job is to believe the victim. While police certainly should (and the SVU cops do) treat victims sympathetically and shouldn't jump to disbelieving them right away either, their job is to investigate and determine the truth, not to take victims at their word and only look for evidence that supports their claim. Several episodes show exactly why this is a bad idea, with "victims" making false accusations or at least not telling the whole truth.
  • In "Burned" a woman accuses her ex husband of raping her, which the ex husband denies. Elliot approaches the situation with an unbiased view and suggests it's possible the husband is telling the truth since the two are in the middle of a nasty divorce and custody battle, and the wife's story has a few holes and she has a history of false accusations. Olivia accuses him of putting his own issues on the wife (he was separated from his wife at the time) and acts like he's not doing his job for wanting to do a full investigation. Eventually, the man is arrested and charged with rape and goes so crazy that sets his ex-wife on fire, killing her. It then turns out he was innocent of the rape he was originally accused of.
  • In "Crush", the DA forces detective Benson to arrest a teenage girl on child porn charges (for "sexting" pictures of herself) in an effort to coerce her into testifying against an attacker. When she does so, the DA attempts to drop the charges, but the judge overrules her and sentences the girl to several years in prison. While the end of the episode reveals that the judge was corrupt, this has two problems. First, the arrest was an obvious case of malicious prosecution, which is a felony, and was one of the few cases (it's a notoriously difficult charge to prove in most jurisdictions) in which it would be an Open-and-Shut Case. Second, even in juvenile court, the judge has no power to do any of that.
    • Alex Cabot commits an awful lot of malicious prosecution and nobody thinks anything of it. That's probably because she's Alex Cabot.
  • Malicious prosecution is commonplace throughout the series, with the DAs' office wanting pretty much every underage suspect charged as an adult, often to intimidate them into implicating someone else who was involved.
  • In "Popular", a nurse cites doctor-patient privilege in refusing to talk with Detective Stabler when she treats a middle school girl who claims her teacher raped her. Captain Cragen, Stabler's wife and even the victim herself give Stabler grief for bothering to do his damn job and investigate the rape; even Stabler treats the whole thing like he's breaking procedure because the privilege is so sacrosanct. Doctor-patient privilege does not cover evidence of a crime: when a medical professional comes across evidence of things such as child abuse, they are required by law to report it to the authorities. A clear-cut admission from their patient would leave them with no wiggle room whatsoever for neglecting their duty in this case. Doctor-patient privilege also only extends to nurses who work with/under actual doctors, school nurses can make no such claim, i.e. if a school nurse determines a kid faked an illness to avoid a test, they're expected to report it to the principal or the child's teacher or parents.
  • "Persona" has Judge Donnelly take a leave of absence from the bench to prosecute a woman who had fled on a murder change years beforehand when Donnelly (the prosecutor on the original case) let her go to the bathroom and she climbed out a window. Not only does this make no sense as she no longer works for the district attorneys office(she would have had to resign when she became a judge), no judge would allow her to act as prosecutor anyway since she clearly had a personal vendetta and was a material witness to the felony escape charge.
  • In "Manipulated", the detectives use a facial recognition program to compare a picture taken on the street to the DMV records for driver's licenses. The judge later throws this out, claiming that the technology was too inconclusive and all the subsequent evidence was tainted. A person has no privacy expectation in a picture taken on a public street or their driver's license photo, so comparing them to each other cannot possibly be a violation of the 4th Amendment. Without a violation, the tree isn't "poisoned" and the remaining evidence is acceptable. What's more, the unreliability of the technology bears upon its admissibility at trial, but they don't need the computer match at trial-once the computer found the picture, the detectives confirmed it by the eyeball test and the suspect's admission. Even further, they already knew of the suspect because he was the husband of the victim's boss and they had an easy argument for inevitable discovery (they would have recognized him from the photo given time).
  • In "Presumed Guilty", even after it was revealed that Fin's ex-brother-in-law had been stopping the attack against Fr. Shea, he is still labeled a vigilante, and the Obstructive Bureaucrat DA says he had no business assaulting someone while on parole, but should have just called 9-1-1. In Real Life, the law recognizes the difference between vigilantism, which is illegal, and defense of a third party, which is not. If you see a crime, such as a burglary or vandalism in progress, and you assault the criminal, or you assault a criminal after a crime has been committed, that is vigilantism. If, however, you see someone being assaulted, you are well within your rights to intervene, even if you literally have to fight off the assailants. (N.B. In some jurisdictions, you had better make sure the person you are helping is actually the victim.)^note Although this one is a little more plausible than most; it's an overreach by the DA, but it's an overreach that could conceivably happen in real life. They'd never get a conviction, but Fin's ex-brother-in-law's case never gets that far anyway.
  • In "Her Negotiation", the judge declares a mistrial after it turns out the physical evidence may have been contaminated. This isn't grounds for a mistrial in real life. The defense can present it to the jury and encourage them to ignore that evidence, but the judge wouldn't declare a mistrial, especially if it was only possible, not certain, that the evidence was contaminated.
  • In "Venom", Darius Parker gets a judge to throw out damning evidence against him (including a full confession) because he had made a comment earlier in the interrogation to the effect that he had a lawyer representing him in an unrelated case. In reality, it's extremely unlikely that any judge would rule that the detectives could reasonably be expected to interpret an offhanded, apparently conversational mention of a lawyer as him invoking his right to counsel, especially since in retrospect it was pretty clearly an intentional setup by Darius. What's more, the judge effectively admits it's sketchy but that he's granting the suppression just to make an example because he feels the police department in general has been playing a bit fast and loose with right to counsel provisions; that alone should be enough to get the ruling overturned on appeal.
  • In the 2014 episode "Producer's Backend" Barba charges a director with sexual tourism under the theory that he traveled to Canada to have sex with a 16 year old actress (in Canada, 16 is the legal age of consent as long as the older party isn't in a position of authority) and states to Benson that they have to prove he went there specifically for the purpose of having sex with this girl by proving he never intended to make the movie he supposedly went to audition her for. While he's correct that the director can be charged, the law regarding "sexual tourism" was changed in 2003 so that any sex with a person under 18 while outside the US is a federal crime regardless if this was their intent on travelling there or not (quite possibly to avert this exact scenario of someone using a pretext to avoid the law), so all they would have to do is confirm that he did in fact have sex with a teenager and he would go down; there would be no need to parse out all the details of whether or not the movie was legit.
  • In "Psycho/Therapist", William Lewis, who is defending himself and called Olivia as his witness, asks to treat Benson as a hostile witness. In real life, this means asking a witness leading questions; in the SVUniverse, this apparently means being allowed to scream at a victim while quite literally foaming at the mouth. Made especially painful by the fact that Barba had been objecting almost constantly before this, but stayed silent the entire time Lewis was screaming at her, up until the end, when he feebly protests that Lewis has crossed the line, though this could have been strategy on Barba's part to show how aggressive and violent Lewis is since he'd been playing the meek victim all trial.
  • Much of the drama in the second half of "Poison" is based around Casey's crusade against a corrupt judge with a lengthy history of classist bias and unethical behavior. When Casey has the corrupt judge arrested for a crime he was likely guilty of, the arraignment judge immediately throws out the case and berates Casey in open court for even daring to try it. This is of course absurd - judges are allowed to be charged and tried for criminal acts just like anyone else (the show cites "judicial immunity" as the reason that the corrupt judge is immune from prosecution, but in real life, this protects judges from liability/lawsuits while performing their duties as a judge. It does not render judges effectively above the law).
  • The fast food manager in 'Authority' is held for questioning even though he lacks 'Mens Rea' (guilty mind), although his actions were technically illegal he genuinely believed he was acting legally on the behalf of the police, it would be unthinkable that he would ever be charged.
  • The case in 'Doubt' still goes to trial, despite the accuser having confessed to falsely accusing an SVU detective of rape and faking a suicide attempt. Most "he said, she said" cases never get near a courtroom, the idea that this would with these circumstances is risible.
  • The Manhattan SVU is supposed to have a 90% clear up rate. In real life it is near 2%.
  • Despite what this series suggests, voluntarily getting drunk does not automatically negate one's capacity to consent to sex; therefore, legally speaking, sex with a drunk woman is not automatically regarded as rape.^note More specifically, there is such a thing as being too drunk to consent, but simply being drunk doesn't qualify; these laws moreso cover situations where a victim is blacked out or so intoxicated that they can't fully understand what they're consenting to.
• Homeschooled Kids: Very extreme example where two brothers are homeschooled because their obsessive, possessive and controlling mother wants them until her complete control. She winds up manipulating the older boy into killing his own brother to keep social services from taking him away. Other examples include a leader of a neo-Nazi group who homeschools his son to prevent him from being exposed to other points of view, and an adoptive mother who homeschools because of her compulsive need for control over her child.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Many instances, but the most egregious one has to be everyone who thought that William Lewis was a good person that was wrongly accused, especially after he ends up screaming at Liv in front of judge, jury, and everyone witnessing the trial.
• The Horseshoe Effect: Seen in "Info Wars", where an Ann Coulter Expy is sexually assaulted, and it is unclear whether the assailant is an Antifa protester or one of her own Psycho Supporters, who is a Klansman in all but name.
• Hostage Situation: "Escape", "Florida", "Shattered", "Blast", "Father's Shadow", "Learning Curve", "Born Psychopath", "Townhouse Incident", "Heartfelt Passages". An amazing number of hostage takers insist on speaking solely to Olivia Benson rather than the trained negotiator.
• Hypocrite: Sonya Paxton. In the episode "Hammered", she tries a man who claims to not have any knowledge of a murder he committed due to an alcoholic blackout, arguing that his blackout doesn't excuse him because, as she says, "alcoholism is not a disease". It later becomes clear that she's got a drinking problem herself, eventually arriving to court while drunk and getting her reputation ruined when she failed a breathalyzer test in court.
  • The cast of the show can often become hypocrites due to lazy or forgetful writers (with a dose of Protagonist-Centered Morality). The episode "Harm", capitalizing on the Iraq torture scandal was all about how using torture to interrogate subjects is wrong, and not only because it can result in death or long-term injury to those it happens to. This is all taking place in spite of the show making unapologetic use of the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique, with even Stabler calling the torturers out for their heartless methods.
  • The cast also has trouble with Jurisdiction Friction; whenever some other case is transferred to them and the original handlers are resentful or reluctant to hand over information, the squad will bawl them out over how selfish they are. They're treated as glory-hogs who are acting at the expense of justice. When it's the SVU squad who's having their case taken away from them to a federal agent or higher branch of the police, it's treated as the worst thing in the world, and the team "heroically" go behind their superior's backs to solve things themselves. The writers invariably make the SVU squad right in this regard by having the feds be either uninterested in sex crimes and wanting to flip the rapist into testifying against some non-violent financial criminal, or by having them just be incompetent.
  • Stabler is disgusted by witnesses who refuse to tell the police what they know about criminals. The only positive thing he ever said about his father was "My father was no rat." Apparently not saying anything about crooked cops is commendable behavior.

I

• I Ate WHAT?!: Elliot's priceless reaction while undercover in "Wildlife" to being told he is about to put a bite of tiger meat into his mouth. He manages to play it off well enough that he doesn't raise any flags for the suspect.
• I Have This Friend: In "Persona," an older woman tells a young battered wife that she had a friend who was abused by her husband and never told anyone. It was her, of course, and she killed the guy in 1974 and got away with it for thirty-odd years, until the detectives put it together.
• I Let Gwen Stacy Die: Benson blames herself for Mike Dodds getting killed in the line of duty. When a similar case to the one that led to Mike's death comes up four years later, she's exceedingly careful to the point of driving Tamin crazy because she doesn't want to take the chance of something like it happening again.
• Intimidating Revenue Service: a favourite tactic of the SVU is to threaten uncooperative witnesses/businesses with being picked apart various government agencies, complete nonsense in real life but even the bluff seems to work for them.
• I Take Offense to That Last One: Happens often to the detectives when interrogating a suspect. An example is in "Hate":
  Fin: "I've got some words for you—killer, psycho."
  Suspect: "Hey, I'm no psycho!"
  • Also occasionally happens outside of interrogation, like in the episode "Responsible":
  Reagan: "Shut up, you dirty old man!"
  Munch: "Who're you calling old?"
• I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine:
  • Mariska Hargitay became best friends with Maria Bello on the set of ER in the late '90s. Bello went on to appear as Olivia's suspected half-sister, Vivian Arliss, in season 12.
  • The same episode that introduced Bello's character featured Alex Kingston as defense attorney Miranda Pond. Kingston had worked with both Hargitay and Bello on the same season of ER.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Ann Margret's washed up drunk character Rita Wills in "Bedtime".
• I Will Wait for You: Played for great creepiness in "Conned", in which a psychiatrist developed feelings for and seduced a thirteen-year-old patient sent to her by his mother. A few years into this, she became pregnant by him, and prevented him from running away by guilting him with how his own father had walked out on him. Shortly thereafter, the now fifteen-year-old kid fell for someone his own age and had sex with her; when the psychiatrist found out, she went to the girl's parents and told them that the boy had raped her, then (fraudulently) diagnosed the boy with schizophrenia and convinced everyone that what he really needed was treatment — under her care, of course. It worked until a con artist wormed his way into the facility and orchestrated a mass escape. When the boy was found months later, after killing the con artist, the psychiatrist got him placed back into her care and immediately started drugging him. Once everything was uncovered, she accepted a plea for a twenty year sentence. As she was being dragged off, she kept yelling at the boy, who was sitting next to his mother and his child by the psychiatrist, that she would wait for him.
• I'll Kill You!: Spoken word for word by Ann Margaret in "Bedtime".
• I'm a Man; I Can't Help It: The detectives generally act as if this trope is a universal truth that's written in stone and handed down by God itself. More than one of their "early-in-the-episode red herring suspects" are only suspects because they said something along the lines of "Yes, believe it or not I actually turned down a chance to have sex when such a chance became available to me", and the detectives react with a "Pshh... right... sure you did, you lying bastard."
  • Conversely, some rape suspects will try to use this to justify their actions, usually by claiming the victim somehow "started it" and what were they supposed to do?
• I Can't Believe a Guy Like You Would Notice Me: Gender inverted and deconstructed in "Choreographed" when a boring nine-to-five man was so convinced that his wife would cheat on him with one of her exciting and artistic coworkers that he injected a tracking chip into her while she was sleeping, which almost killed her because he didn't sterilize the injection site.
• Innocent Awkward Question: In the episode "Savant", the only witness to a brutal assault was the victim's daughter, who has a condition that gives her limited intelligence but extremely good hearing and near-perfect aural recall, which allows her to remember everything the assailant said in graphic detail before the assault, but also means that she wasn't nearby when the assault happened, as the noise had scared her, and thus didn't see the assailant's face. When they bring their most likely suspect in front of her, she says that he doesn't sound like the man who assaulted her mom, and the detectives are stumped... up until the suspect's son says something, and the little girl immediately makes a beeline for him and demands to know why he called her mother a bitch, since that's a word for a female dog.
• Insane Troll Logic:
  • Used in a very twisted way by the Villain of the Week in "Pure" who kidnaps and rapes virgins, and then says he had to because his wife wasn't a virgin when they tried to consummate their marriage.
  • In "Manic", a boy has a drug-induced psychotic breakdown and kills two of his classmates after a considerable history of mental issues. This breakdown occurs because his school, due to said history, insists he won't be allowed to continue attending school until he's medicated and his mother, in flagrant disregard of the medical advice she was given by her doctor and against the dosage and safety instructions included with the medication she received, starts giving her pubescent son her pills in secret. Obviously, that means the CEO who approved sending mental health patients their medicine free of charge has blood on his hands.
  • In "Real Fake News," a website puts out word of a Congressman using a Chinese diner as a sex slave operation. Rollins and Finn go the site's owner who shows "proof" in the form of an e-mail the Congressman sent about how the place got a "fresh batch of Chinese broccoli" in and they have to try out. As they shrug, the man just laughs on how it's "obvious" that's code for an underage Chinese sex slave as "who eats dinner at 4 pm?"
  Owner: On pedophile boards, CB stands for Chinese Brides.
  Finn: It can also stand for Chinese broccoli.
  • To further his "proof" the man shows off photos of young women leaving and asking "Where are their mothers?" He then shows how the diner's logo is a dragon with a tail he claims is heart-shaped which matches a pedophile symbol. Rollins can only Face Palm in response to this lunacy.
• The Insomniac:
  • The detectives will go without sleep for days at a time.
  • A witness in "Bombshell" suffers from Fatal Familial Insomnia, which makes him appear crazy (the victim's blood on his clothes doesn't help). Dr. Huang looks really guilty when the guy perks up and asks if he'll get better.
  • A drug-induced version in "Hothouse", where a teenage girl turns out to be abusing anti-narcolepsy medication because she had to pull regular all-nighters to keep up with the demands of her Boarding School of Horrors. According to her, it's not only common practice at the school but is actually covertly endorsed by the school staff.
• Insurance Fraud: In "Deadly Ambition", Rollins's sister Kim sets up her abusive boyfriend to be killed so she can collect his life insurance... that she secretly put on him... and forged her sister's name to (she was gonna share!). When Kim learns that she won't get the money since her boyfriend was killed while committing a felony (Rollins thought Kim was being raped) she changes her story so it looks like Rollins shot him in cold blood. Fortunately for Rollins it becomes clear that the scheme has collapsed so Kim settles for skipping town with all of Rollins' possessions.
  • In "Torch" a man becomes a suspect when the house fire that killed his daughters is ruled arson, and the case is strengthened when it's revealed he lit a car on fire for the purpose of insurance fraud before; police and prosecutors theorize that he was trying to burn down the house for the insurance money but it spread faster than expected and he couldn't get the girls out in time, leaving him liable for both arson and manslaughter. However, new evidence casts doubt on the arson ruling, and the case is ultimately dismissed because it was likely a genuine accident.
• Ironic Death: In "Smoked" Sister Peg dealt with mentally unstable homeless people, vicious pimps, and drug addicts on a daily basis, not to mention the various attempts on her life, and the person who (accidentally) kills her? A random teenage girl who was aiming at someone else. Then again, Sister Peg risking her life and heroically sacrificing herself is very appropriate.
• Ironic Name:
  • Detective Elliot Stabler isn't stable.
  • "Amanda" means "having to be loved", "deserving to be loved" and "worthy of love". People on Detective Amanda Rollins' personal life tend to be either ungrateful, unappreciative or insincere towards her.
• Iron Lady: Elizabeth Donnelly. Also, Alex Cabot (which causes a LOT of friction between the two).
• Irony: Olivia frequently expresses her fears that the combination of an alcoholic mother and a rapist father will one day make her into a monster; Elliot reassures her that she's fine, and that it's not all about the genes.. but he's the son of a mentally unstable mother and a physically abusive father, and he's had at least one incident of losing his temper at one of his kids ^note although he immediately regretted it, stopped himself, and apologized, which is probably more than his father ever did, and his daughter has the same mental difficulties as his mother.
  • "Gone" sees the detectives struggling to solve the disappearance of a teenage girl; they have three suspects but no body and not enough other evidence to convict them. Casey manages to get one of the boys, Jason, to testify against the other two, and after he testifies in the grand jury he disappears as well; since the prosecution can't find him or conclusively prove that he was kidnapped, the case is dismissed with prejudice. Afterwards, with some more hunting, the detectives finally manage to find the getaway car that the boys were driving when they committed the original murder...and it was in the city impound lot the entire time, overlooked because someone inputted the wrong number when they were entering the car into the system. It does at least lead the detectives to Jason's body and allow them to charge the other two boys for that crime instead.
• It's Personal: So frequent, it became the premise of the entire show. Again, see also Idiot Ball.
  • Not even the judges are are immune to this trope, as in "Persona" Judge Donnelly temporarily steps down in order to prosecute a woman (whose case she had previously worked) who escaped conviction for murdering her husband for years, all because she inadvertently made her a laughingstock in front of the boys.
  • The episode "Blinded" has a double dose of this trope: the episode features a child rapist named Saul Picard who was suffering from schizophrenia and badly injured Elliot while suffering a psychotic break, rendering him temporarily blind. Casey ends up botching the ensuing court case to get him declared incompetent to stand trial (even though he wanted to be extradited to Louisiana, where child rape is punishable by death) and sent to a psychiatric facility, due to her experience with a mentally ill fiance some years back that she thought she could help him and Picard. Olivia is quite pissed as a result and rats Picard out to the Feds (so they can extradite Picard to Louisiana) and rats Casey out to Jack McCoy because she, personally, wanted to see Picard convicted and executed as revenge for Elliot without getting her hands dirty. Casey and Olivia confront each other over how they've each been manipulating the handles of this case and make amends by the end of the episode but you can't help but wonder how neither of them got into serious trouble for bringing their personal vendettas to the case.
  • From "The Book of Esther" season 19, episode 20:
    • Tutuola: "You're taking this kind of personal, Amanda",
    • Rollins: "If I don't, what am I doing here?" ^note Rollins winds up causing the death of the titular victim, Esther
• I've Never Seen Anything Like This Before: The situation in "Greed" is apparently this for the entire justice system.
  Cabot: I checked the case law. There has never been a situation like this.

J

• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: At times, Elliot, Fin or Olivia beat up suspects and culprits alike, or emotionally blackmailing both witnesses and victims, driving at least one of them to suicide. It's all in the name of justice!
  Dr. Huang: What are you gonna do next, bash in people's skulls to make them talk?
• Jerkass: Elliot Stabler, at times. He beats up innocent men, verbally abuses others, ruins one innocent man's life after accusing him of pedophilia on a flawed report, and commits at least several counts of police misconduct. It actually got bad enough at one point that he was temporarily assigned another partner that was just like him in order to see how frustrating it was for the rest of the team to work with him.
  • Ed Tucker, from the Internal Affairs Bureau. He has it out for the detectives from SVU, especially Elliot. He gets better.
• Jerkass Has a Point: when Benson and Amaro try to take Holden March in for questioning without formally arresting him he calls their bluff and refuses, correctly asserting they are violating his human rights.
  • Merrit Rook has many good points to make about human nature.
  • Numerous defence lawyers call the SVU out on their double standards over the years.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: In "Pornstar's Requiem", a young woman who stars in rape-fantasy porn to pay for college is really raped, and her attackers are charged. After the rapists are convicted, the judge overturns the verdict, stating that the evidence is ambiguous. Debatable, but then the judge goes on to accuse the victim of staging the entire thing as a publicity stunt, making it clear that he was hostile to her from the beginning. Rafael Barba, the prosecutor, is livid, telling the judge that he's "setting the clock back on rape law fifty years" (in the most overt display of anger ever seen from Barba up until that point) and declaring without hesitation that he's going to appeal the ruling.
• Jurisdiction Friction: SVU has clashed with other jursidictions as diverse as: other departments of the NYPD, the FBI, counter-terrorism agencies, the US military, and the nation of Canada.
• Just a Flesh Wound:
  • Without fail, every bullet taken by one of the main characters will "narrowly miss" a lung or major artery, and they can be expected to make a "full recovery", though occasionally the injury will carry over into the next few episodes. Double subverted when everyone thinks Alex Cabot died from a bullet to the shoulder, but it turns out she survived and is going into Witness Protection.
  • See also M.E. Warner's A Day in the Limelight episode, "Blast", where she shoots a perp in the leg, intending to cause nonfatal damage. In reality, a bullet to the leg has a very substantial chance of causing a life-threatening injury thanks to the numerous arteries running through the leg. Her training as a medical examiner is no excuse; knowing where the arteries are located neither grants a person impeccable marksmanship (she is said to have some firearms training, but that's a long way from being a perfect shot), nor does it change the fact that a fragmenting round's shrapnel is inherently unpredictable. (However, since the perp in question was about to commit suicide by cop, it does make sense that Warner would decide that taking a chance on a hopefully non-lethal shot that might go wrong and kill him still presented a better chance for his survival than a volley of bullets that would turn him into swiss cheese.)
  • When Munch was Shot in the Ass, his partner several seasons later claims that he still sits on a doughnut.
  • Subverted and made a running gag with Stabler and Dana Lewis, in which every time she shows up, he ends up with an obviously non-threatening injury. (Only the last of these is actually her fault; the other injuries were directly case-related.)
  • Subverted with Amaro in "Surrendering Noah"; part of his reason for retiring is that there's some question about whether he'll be able to come back to a hundred percent after being shot in the knee.
• Just One Little Mistake: Susan Delzio in "Bedtime". It turns out that the man everybody thought was dead was actually alive, hidden away by Susan.

K

• Karma Houdini: Typically if an episode has a Downer Ending it will be some variety of this.
• Karma Houdini Warranty:
  • Rarely, but a notable example is Kenneth Cleary from seasons 1 and 2. In his debut episode, he gets away with multiple rapes because one of his victims couldn't ID him in a lineup. In Cleary's second appearance, he again skates on multiple rapes because his wife bungles her testimony (in what appears to be a misguided attempt to help). In the final scene of the episode, Cleary has been shot dead, with both Harper and the wife claiming the wife shot him in self-defense and then "panicked" and inadvertantly destroyed the evidence that would prove this story. The cops are not entirely convinced.
  • The SVU unit's warranty expires in "Screwed." While they are protagonists that aggressively investigate sex crimes, most of them have done things throughout the show's run that are unethical at best, outright criminal at worst (Olivia sending money to her suspected rapist brother, Elliot getting his daughter off scot-free for a DUI, and Fin's suspicious activities while undercover are the most significant). These incidents allow Darius Parker, who killed a woman and her baby, to discredit their testimonies and escape any punishment whatsoever for a crime he definitely committed. All of the SVU (save Munch) get punished after the trial's conclusion for their behavior.
• Kayfabe Music: The show used this twice. Two big scary musicians, suspected of horrible crimes.
  • One is a black "gangster" rapper suspected of rape/murder on a white woman. However, he is actually quite naive and has no experience of real crime, his gangster persona being nothing more than a kayfabe persona. The woman was one of his friends, and he ends up getting killed by a real gangster (who just happens to be white) as he's trying to help the detectives catch the real villain.
  • The other is a "vampire" who is afraid of getting HIV from real blood.
• Kicked Upstairs: Detective John Munch, after over a decade between Homicide and this series, is finally promoted to Sergeant, due to his taking the exam (which he claims was because of a bar bet). In practice, though, this is mostly just an excuse for keeping him away from the action and offscreen.
• The Killer Becomes the Killed: "Chameleon" begins with the team going after a sexually motivated spree killer, who ends up being killed by a serial killing prostitute.
• The Killer Was Left-Handed:
  • A major plot point in "Criminal"; a defining characteristic of the perp was that he was left-handed.
  • In another episode, the perp had two sets of DNA. This is Truth in Television — it's called Chimera Syndrome. (In this case, it was from a bone marrow transplant that caused his body to produce blood with a different DNA profile, but such things have been known to happen naturally.)
  • In the episode "Beef", Olivia was able to deduce that the foreman that they had a ton of evidence against including his DNA and a confession was innocent because he was left handed and the victim's wounds indicated a right-handed killer.
  • Subverted in the first episode, when a character tries to hide her left-handedness by using her right hand.
• Kill the Parent, Raise the Child
  • In one episode, Martin Short plays the Perp Of The Week, a rapist and murderer obsessed with virgins. He has a devoted wife and a little boy, but as the episode progresses, it's discovered that the wife actually can't have children because her husband refuses to have sex with her; he's obsessed with virgins and she wasn't one. She assaulted a woman who was near the end of her pregnancy and cut the unborn child from her womb in order to give her husband a son. She goes to prison at the end of the episode, with Stabler informing her, to her complete surprise, that the boy is being returned "to his real father, the grieving husband of the woman you butchered."
  • Another episode had Sharon Lawrence play an Aileen Wuornos-inspired character who was also a loving mother. Her "son" was actually a little boy she had abducted from a supermarket after strangling his mother and leaving her widower to believe that he was dead, too.

L

• The Lab Rat: The Crime Scene Unit two less as of 2009
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: Stabler's Epic Chin of Justice.
  • Olivia and Alex aren't lacking in the chin department either.
• Last-Name Basis : Zigzagged a bit. Munch is almost never called by his first name John (this goes as far as Elliot referring to him as "Uncle Munchie" to his kids on one occasion). Season 1's Jefferies and Cassidy were rarely, if ever, called Monique or Brian (though the latter got to first-name basis with series lead Olivia Benson as her boyfriend in later years). Huang's first name George is likewise seldom heard. Barba is rarely referred to by his first name (Rafael) unless he is being introduced or is in the company of family or close friends. Carisi is never called by his first name (Dominic) and is generally only called Sonny by his family, although Olivia does call him "Uncle Sonny" to Noah at one point, a name that Amanda's daughters are also shown to use for him. Speaking of Amanda, she is almost always referred to by her last name Rollins, and seldom by her first. Cragen's first name Don is also rare, though that's probably because no one in the show is realistically his social equal. But for most characters, they get the last-name treatment in official business while being addressed as normal people in social situations - particularly Elliot and Liv. Two aversions are Fin — in really official situations, his last name Tutoula does get used, but for the most part, he's "Detective Fin"; and Detective Amaro, who is far more commonly referred to by his first name Nick by just about everybody.
  • The "official business" aspect of this is humorously reinforced in a season 1 conversation with the visiting Lennie Briscoe and his kid nephew Ken, who worked for SVU that year.
    Lennie: Cool it with the 'Uncle Lennie' stuff around the station.
    Ken: What shall I call you?
    Lennie: Briscoe.
    Ken: What will you call me?
    Lennie: Briscoe.
    Ken: [looks perplexed]
• Last of His Kind: The only remaining first-run series in a franchise that once roamed the NBC schedule like buffalo. Within the cast itself, Olivia becomes the only remaining original cast member after Cragen leaves in Season 15.
• Left Hanging: The season eleven episode "Savior" did this. A young prostitute goes into premature labor and her baby is put on life support. The mother then runs away, giving power of attorney to Olivia, effectively giving Olivia the choice of whether the baby lives or dies. The episode ends with the baby needing immediate brain surgery and the doctors hammering Olivia for a decision that she never gives. This turns into a case of What Happened to the Mouse?, as neither the baby nor the mother are ever seen or heard from again.
  • Which becomes Fridge Horror, as there's a very, very sound reason why the baby wouldn't be heard from again...
  • An earlier episode, "Doubt", does this to the audience, as the rape case boils down to He Said She Said - the jury's verdict was never uttered on-screen.
• Less Embarrassing Term: Inverted in "Dolls" when they caught a suspect by exploiting his love of doll collecting. Fin tried to build rapport with the guy by admitting that as a child he had played with dolls, too, such as G.I. Joe. The guy corrected him that those were not dolls, they were action figures.
• The Lethal Connotation of Guns and Others: "Infected" starts off with finding the rapist and murderer of Nathan's mom and later on her aunt Gina. Then the plot switches to the discussion of this trope when Nathan kills his mother's killer and his lawyer tries to defend him by indicating that him witnessing gun violence also made him violent.
• Lethal Negligence: The show has a good portion of their episodes devoted to this type of crime. Special mentions include:
  • Season 2's "Abuse," which involves a celebrity couple who emotionally neglect their children. SVU becomes involved when the older child is killed after running into traffic, after the parents lost track of him at his own birthday party. The rest of the episode revolves around the younger daughter, who engages in self-harm to get their attention. The episode ends without resolving this issue or the neglect, leaving lingering concern that the daughter will one day go too far in her efforts to get the attention she craves.
  • Season 4’s “Risk,” which involves smuggled cocaine in baby formula. A couple posing as a loving family with an infant are trafficking it from south of the border, and when their housekeeper takes the wrong can out of desperation, her child dies from the tainted milk.
  • Season 5’s “Manic,” which ends with a pharmaceutical company being sued for sending unregulated samples through the mail that induced psychosis in a teenager who later brought a gun to school and killed two classmates.
  • Season 10’s “Retro,” in which a case about a baby with untreated AIDS uncovers a quack doctor who is an AIDS-denialist; he is put on trial after it’s uncovered that his influence led to the death of another child, whose mother did not get her tested or treated.
  • Season 10’s “Lead,” which is similar to “Manic” in which a toy company is sued over using illegal leaded paint on their toys. A young man who killed a local doctor accused of molesting his patients had acquired a lead-exposure developmental disability after playing with and mouthing the toys as a child.
  • Season 17’s “Institutional Fail,” in which a child dies despite being under the purview of Child and Family Services, who were found to be faking records of visits to keep up with their overwhelming caseload.
• Like Father, Like Son: In "Dissonant Voices" when Brooke’s parents separated she watched her mother make numerous false reports about her father so when Jackie Walker dropped her and her friend from his private coaching they manipulated their brothers into saying he molested them.
• Like Goes with Like: The episode "Snitch" has an African man married to a couple of African women and a white one. In the end of the episode it's just him and his black wife.
• Limited Wardrobe: Usually averted, like most live TV shows, but weirdly played straight with Fin's son, Ken, who has worn the same grey T-shirt/tan jacket combination in all of the five episodes he appeared in for at least one scene.
• Littlest Cancer Patient: "Sick" plays with this: the child is sick, but not from the leukemia she thinks she has — her grandmother is just making her ill to bilk charities.
• Living Lie Detector: Martin Short as a serial killer, who uses his skills to pretend to be a psychic and play games with his victims' families.
  • Incidentally, the system he supposedly uses is real. It was developed by the guy who inspired Lie to Me.
• Longer-Than-Life Sentence: "Hardwired" ends with the leader of a pedophile rights group leader who convinced a man to rape his stepson to ten years for accessory, plus two years for every image of child pornography he had in his possession, totaling around 3000 years.
• Long-Runners: Debuted in 1999 and still going strong in 2022, defeating Gunsmoke with its 21st season. SVU is currently the last scripted, non-animated, prime-time U.S. series to have debuted during the twentieth century.
• Love Makes You Crazy and Evil and Stupid: An example of all three being the swinger who fell in love with a con-artist (which caused his wife to stab him into a coma), paid her bail after she was arrested, and when the detectives revealed that the only person she really loved was her brother (yes, like that), killed her brother so she would have to be with him. One can only imagine what his teenage daughter thinks of all this.
  • 'Nother one: FBI Agent Dana Lewis murdered her ex-boyfriend's fiancee in a fit of rage after she learned the other woman was pregnant (when she told him she was pregnant he made her get an abortion and a few months later dumped her and told her he was getting married) and pinned the crime on a serial rapist/murderer she was hunting. 20-something years later the rapist/murderer is caught and, wouldn't you know, isn't really keen on confessing to the one crime he didn't commit, especially since he hates redheads, he used his NBA connection to lure women (the victim didn't care for sports), and he hunted in bars (when he learned his "last victim" was pregnant he wondered why a pregnant woman, especially a kindergarten teacher, would be anywhere near a bar).

M

• Made of Explodium: The car that Edwin Adelson drives in "Bullseye".
  • The exploding car gambit happens to Tim Donovan in "Loss" as well. Justified in that case, since his car was deliberately rigged with an explosive.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: Sometimes the prosecutors take cases over which they shouldn't have jurisdiction.
  • In "Baby Killer" Cabot was given a case with a seven-year-old defendant, even though a child that young can't be prosecuted as an adult, and thus could only be prosecuted by Corporations Counsel, not the District Attorney's Office.
  • In "The Darkest Journey Home" Carisi prosecutes the case, even though the rape happened in Brooklyn.
  • This does occasionally get deconstructed when the main characters work on cases to which they have a personal connection, which is against policy and therefore should be worked on by other cops. Defense attorneys then use it to accuse the cops of being biased.
• Mama Bear: There are quite a few. Whether they're helpful or obstructive depends on the plot and whatever issue their child is going through.
  • Sophie Gerard in "Shattered". Do not tell her that her son is dead and not coming back.
  • There's also Eva Santiago, who almost ended up killing the man that molested her son.
  • The mother in "Locum" is a more problematic version, as she's so concerned with protecting her daughter that she barely lets her out of her sight.
  • Olivia herself after she becomes the foster mother to, and later adopts, a child whose mother under Liv's care was raped and murdered at the end of Season 15.
  • "Undercover Mother" featured a mother who had been working undercover on her own as a madam for three years straight in hopes of finding her trafficked daughter. She succeeds, and it is beautiful.
• Man Bites Man: Deliberately provoked in one episode, after the standard legal methods (and one illegal method) of obtaining the suspect's DNA had failed.
• Manipulative Bastard / Manipulative Bitch: Many.
• Manufacturing Victims: The show has played this card a few times.
  • There's a few episodes that deal with "repressed memory" therapists and the problems they cause, since "repressed memories" are usually false.
  • The cast does it too, though. There are numerous incidents where a "victim" doesn't think she was victimized, and she is portrayed as being in denial. Which is possible, although in some cases it seems more like they legitimately weren't traumatized by whatever "should" have traumatized them.
    • On one occasion, the victim couldn't remember the rape since she'd been drugged (the squad only knows because the rapist recorded it) and makes the argument to Liv that she is trying to make her feel victimized while Liv maintains that the woman has to deal with the trauma, even if she can't remember.
  Victim (having not claimed to have been assaulted up to this point): "How did I get these bruises on my legs?"
  Benson: "That's where your rapist prised your thighs apart prior to raping you".
• Magical Queer: Fin's son, Ken, seems to be becoming a fairly realistic version of this trope; as he is a Twofer Token Minority, he could double as a Magical Negro as well, although most of his plotlines have more to do with being gay than black. In every episode he's appeared in, he's volunteering with some new group or helping a friend in danger. Naturally, his help never really works, but he's still a decent, helpful gay guy whose boyfriend has never been seen on camera. He finally appears as Ken's fiancee and is promptly beaten into a coma, although a later episode reveals that he survived and he and Ken married.
• Mauve Shirt: This show is even better than the original at maintaining a large recurring cast. In addition to the billed cast (of whom both Dr. Huang and Dr. Warner were promoted to the opening titles; before that, they too were examples of this trope), we have the CSU techie(s), the TARU techie, about a half-dozen judges, about a half-dozen defense attorneys, Stabler's family, Fin's ex-wife and son, the recurring IAB guy... the list is endless. In some episodes, the only non-recurring characters to appear in more than one scene are the victim and the perp. And yes, at least two of these Mauve Shirts have been conspicuously killed off: the lead CSU techie, O'Halloran, is stabbed to death in the Season 10 finale, while the IAB guy, Tucker, commits suicide in season 21 after learning he has terminal cancer. Plenty of others have had their share of close calls, too.
• Meaningful Name:
  • "Olivia" is usually associated with harmony, befitting a law enforcer. Not only that, but Benson is usually the one who goes for calmer and peaceful methods when doing her job.
  • "Donald" means "great chief of a mighty world". Captain Donald Cragen is of course Da Chief of the titular hardworking unit.
  • Fin's son goes by the name Ken Randall, but his actual name (or at least his birth name, as it's unclear if he just goes by a different name or if he actually had a legal name change) is Kwasi Tutuola. Kwasi is meant to sound like the stem quasi, which means "having some resemblance." In his first appearance — the only one where his real name is mentioned — he has a rather strained relationship with Fin.
  • Speaking of which, "Odafin" means "lawmaker" or "establisher of laws."
  • "Alexandra" means defender of men. Enter A.D.A Alexandra Cabot.
  • "Casey" means brave. A.D.A Casey Novak is fond of making risky decisions, to the point that during the season 9 finale, she gets suspended after doing what she thinks is right and wasn't able to practice until season 12.
  • Amaro, in Latin, means bitter (for taste) or sour (for behavior). Given Nick's amount of, well, bitterness towards his past and all...
• Medication Tampering: In "Conned", the team discovers that a doctor intentionally faked a teenager's schizophrenia diagnosis, including using medication to induce symptoms, because she was having an illicit sexual relationship with him.
• Memory Wipe Exploitation: Played for Drama in one episode of where a famous football player, Lincoln Haver, is accused of killing his common-law husband is manipulated into confessing to the murder. It's later discovered Lincoln was diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephlity^note a brain condition caused by contact sports that results in memory loss and actually doesn't remember the night in question; as a result, Lincoln is initially convicted of murder before being released after his agent Gary slips and makes a comment that indicates he knew more about the situation than he was telling.
• Mighty Whitey: Stabler in the Chinatown-centric episode "Debt," especially since the actual Asian-American member of the main cast (Huang) gets shoved aside. However, they do discuss the possibility of using Huang, but they realize that having a Chinese man they've never met suddenly appear and start asking questions would make it pretty clear that something's up; Stabler supposedly being a local girl's white boyfriend lets him be there to protect her while she (a familiar face) asks the questions, and because he's not Chinese, it's not suspicious that he's not a known member of the community. (Huang does play a critical role in a sting later on.)
• Mind Rape: (Of the "mundane kind", of course): Merrit Rook puts Elliot and Olivia through this once. It fails, by the way.
  • More than one interrogation session feels a lot like this. A good example is Olivia and Dr. Hendrix in "Contagious" browbeating and pressuring a stressed and terrified little girl into revealing who raped her, to the point where she falsely accuses her coach to get them to stop. Another is when Olivia pressures a mentally-ill witness into temporarily modifying his medical routine so he can testify in a specially difficult case... she later finds the dude's lifeless body, as he has hung himself due to both her abusive behavior towards him and the side-effects of said med changes.. Truth in Television, as police interrogations really can seem like Mind Rape in Real Life and very often do lead to false accusations and/or confessions.
  • The perp in "Spellbound" used hypnosis to incapacitate his victim before raping her.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: "Informed" begins with a woman in the ER loudly complaining about a rash on her arm, right as someone with severe injuries is being driven by in a stretcher. Then a girl wearing a hoodie comes up to the doctor and removes her hood, revealing blood and bruises on her freshly shaved head, and says, "Please tell me I get to go before her."
• Miscarriage of Justice: too numerous to mention, the SVU has sent 5 innocent men to prison and gotten others killed not to mention hundreds arrested and prosecuted.
• Mistaken for Gay:
  • One episode had a witness give Olivia his home phone number and suggest that she give his bisexual wife a call.
  • This actually becomes an SVU Running Gag, as people continually mistake Olivia for gay. The section of the fandom who think she's in love with Hello, Attorney! Alexandra Cabot lap this up.
  • Then there's this delightful exchange in "P.C." after a woman tried to kiss Olivia:

    Benson: El, do you ever get a gay vibe from me?
    Stabler: [beat] Would it matter if I did?
    Benson:...You're not answering the question.

  • Fin and Lake were mistaken for a couple while trying to get eyewitness statements without revealing that they were cops. Lake decided to roll with it by putting his hand on Fin's thigh. The look on Fin's face...
• Missing White Woman Syndrome: "Spectacle" centers around a kidnapped white teenage girl. The culprit is a teenager named Greg who is skilled with computers and threatens that he will kill her if his demands are not met. He periodically sends them videos of her undergoing torture and being raped but it turns out the whole thing was staged and everyone was in on it. They were using this societal tendency to get the attention of the FBI so that they could ask their help in finding Greg's little brother who was kidnapped a few years ago.The girl was never in trouble or harmed and neither was anyone else.
• Mob Debt: The Gambling Addict Kim Rollins owes money to the mob over unpaid poker debts and they blackmail her into destroying evidence in "Gambler's Fallacy".
• Mood Whiplash: the commercial break cliffhangers have a tendency to lead into upbeat, family-friendly commercials.
  • "Intimidation Game", an episode centered on online gaming culture, caps off a Downer Ending with "Executive Producer: Dick Wolf", who's name carries certain ironic connotations in the online gaming sphere.
  • The Cruel Twist Ending of "Heartfelt Passages" comes on the heels of a lighthearted scene that really makes it look like Mike's going to be okay.
• Moral Luck: The detectives often arrest, accuse, and harass people they don't like based on flimsy evidence or a "gut feeling". Many times these suspects turn out to be guilty, other times they turn out to be Red Herrings but later turn out to be guilty of unrelated crimes that the detectives had no way of knowing about at the time of arrest. This helps the detectives seem more competent and less deserving of reprimand than they actually are.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: "Harm" deals with a doctor who works with private military contractors to oversee their use of "enhanced interrogation methods" (a fancy way of saying "torture").
• Mother of a Thousand Young: A "reproductive abuser" who fathered 46 children, twenty in New York alone and compared himself to Montezuma and other harem keepers his 47th child was killed when his mother committed murder-suicide after he refused to become more involved than a check once a month. He met his end after the psychologist who identified him as an abuser decided to become a vigilante woman (again - she'd previously beaten a child rapist to death with a bat); she "just" wanted to cut off his penis but accidentally blew him up because the knife was filled with compressed air.
  • The preacher in "Sin" and his wife have ten children.
  • The Duggar-Expy family in "Patrimonial Burden" also has ten children, although the youngest is actually their grandchild; they raised him as their own to cover up their teenage daughter's unwed pregnancy.
• Mrs. Robinson: In "Responsible", Becca's mom is sleeping with her daughter's 17-year-old male classmate. She tries to justify it by bringing up that her ex-husband was cheating on her with his secretary, and says, "I figured out, if he could have a younger woman, I could have a younger man." Olivia doesn't buy it.
• Must Have Caffeine: Almost everyone has moments of this, but the crowner is Barba.
  Muñoz: I thought we could grab a cup of coffee.
  Barba: I'm already on my fourth cup. (Note that this scene takes place early in the morning, and throughout the day he is seen drinking at least two more cups.)
  • And in another episode:
  Rollins: (After Barba talks fast enough that the detectives can't get a word in edgewise) You ever think about going off caffeine?
  Barba: That would be a no. So, why are we here?
• Murder the Hypotenuse: Olivia tells Dale that if he murders Elliot, he can be her new partner and lover. It's all a diversion so that she and Elliot can take him out and have him arrested.
• Mutual Envy: In October Surprise, Muñoz and Barba have this. Muñoz envies Barba for getting out of their barrio and getting an Ivy League scholarship, while Barba envies him because his mom said Muñoz would be mayor of New York one day, but never said that about him, and because Muñoz ended up married to the girl Barba loved (and possibly still loves).
• My Beloved Smother:
  • In "Home", Marilyn Nesbit homeschools her two sons and controls every aspect of their lives, including what they eat, who they talk to, and what they do in their spare time. She believes that processed food causes cancer and doesn't give her younger son enough to eat, to the point that he resorts to eating out of the garbage. When SVU investigates, Marilyn has her older son kill her youngest son so he won't be taken away by child protective services.
  • The mother in "Locum" barely lets her adopted daughter out of her sight for fear that something bad will happen to her, a paranoia largely driven by the fact that the parents' biological daughter disappeared a decade earlier and the case was never solved. Especially given that the girl is a former foster child used to taking care of herself, it doesn't go over well.
  • Possibly the most extreme one ever in "Tragedy". A woman's adult daughter started a relationship with a man who had a pregnant ex-girlfriend. The mother hired a hitman to kidnap and murder the ex-girlfriend and her newborn baby, so her own daughter could marry the boyfriend and have a happy life together. Her daughter is not pleased when she finds out.
    Melinda: Why did you do this?
    Melinda's mother: Why? I had no other choice. You love Daniel. You deserve a wonderful life together. That baby would have ruined everything.
    Melinda: I told you that didn't matter to me.
    Melinda's mother: Oh, you've always been so trusting. But I know men. Daniel would have taken your money and gone back to that woman and her baby. I did this for you. I wanted you to be happy. That's all I ever wanted!
• My Card: Olivia was actually once framed by a guy who killed somebody and left Olivia's card on the body... as well as her (fabricated) DNA on the knife.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • In "Anchor": Randall Carver, a defense attorney, succeeds in getting his client, who was charged with murdering the children of immigrants, found "not guilty". The defendant whispered to him his intent to continue murdering, disturbing him greatly and leading Carver to kill him.
  • Strongly implied in "Turmoil". A girl is bribed to sell out her friend, a rape victim, on the witness stand, and lie that she claimed she was never raped. It's only after the prosecutor drops the charges against the perp due to shaky evidence and the victim attempts (and fails) to kill herself, does the girl step forward, willing to admit in court that her friend did not recant as she herself had originally stated.
• My Greatest Failure: Captain Jackson, a therapist specializing in sex addicts, pursued his career after a dark period in his life when he, himself, was addicted to sex and alcohol. During this time, his daughter became estranged from him, causing him to believe he had raped her (but he couldn't remember it because alcohol muddled his memory). Turns out he never hurt his daughter, but rather had consensual sex with her friend. The estrangement was because his daughter's friend was her first love.
• Mythology Gag: In Season 15's Gambler's Fallacy, Rollins has to steal a gun from the evidence locker, and masquerades as Criminal Intent's Detective Megan Wheeler. Brought up again when questioning the on-duty cop, when they mention Wheeler's retirement in 2010.

N

• Naïve Newcomer: The pilot, while not a formal Welcome Episode, depicts Benson as a very recent transfer to SVU.
  • The episode "Wannabe" has a rookie officer make mistakes while apprehending a rapist that get the case thrown out. The "officer" turns out to be a teenager with a stolen uniform.
  • Though he's eventually established to have predated Benson at SVU, Brian Cassidy in Season 1 clearly hasn't been around very long himself; he's seen asking Munch for advice on how to deal with the mental impact of working on those kinds of crimes, and ultimately quits because he can't deal. Although it's ultimately revealed it's more complicated than it initially seemed.
• Naughty Birdwatching: The cold open for season 6's "Hooked" involves some scouts stargazing on a roof, and a couple of them use the opportunity for "peeping at other heavenly bodies". Naturally, they quickly spot a corpse too.
  • In Season 12's "Mask", two boys are spying on their neighbors with binoculars when they see a man raping a woman and beating up her girlfriend. To their credit, they immediately report it as soon as they realize what's happening.
• Nepotism: In Season 17, Deputy Chief Dodds gets his son assigned to SVU as Benson's second-in-command, leading to (probably not unjustified) accusations of this. However, the younger Dodds proves himself worthy of the position in his own right, and eventually gains the trust and respect of the unit.
• Neverending Terror: A particularly twisted example in "Behave" with a serial rapist who takes sick pleasure in stalking and tracking his victims after their first assault and then raping them again and again at random points in their lives. One woman is so broken by the experience that her career, marriage, family and entire life got to pieces as she becomes afraid of ANY human interaction, or even leaving her house...forcing her to live in painful solitude. The criminal gets pleasure from knowing he's the only thing these women think about, every moment of their lives. The team finally catches him, but not until after he kidnaps the character described above and holds her for over 12 hours.
• Never Going Back to Prison: In "Solitary", A Red Herring from one case is terrified of going back to prison and being put in solitary because of his previous experiences with solitary confinement. He throws Stabler off a roof when he thinks Stabler is going to arrest him, and even so Stabler is so moved by how obviously traumatized the guy is that the rest of the episode follows Stabler's attempts to keep the guy from going into solitary in prison.
• Never My Fault: Oh poor little Annette Cole. If you had not been such a bitch to your employees in the wine business...this could have all been avoided. But you just had to kill yourself...didn't you?
  • In "Denial", the Villain of the Week's mother finally confronts her with how she smothered her infant son to death decades earlier. Her response is that it's her mother's fault because her mother refused to watch the baby for the night.
  • While the cops always feel sad when an innocent person’s life is ruined they see it as a consequence of pursuing a case, yet they are the ones who usually make such a public spectacle of it often doing a Perp Walk or hounding the accused in front of people even when they have little to no evidence.
• New Media Are Evil:
  • The internet, more often than not, will either kill you or make you a sex trafficking victim.
  • Video games will just straight up kill you, more often than not. One episode deals with a killing that was inspired by a Grand Theft Auto-a-like called Nten City, complete with a defense attorney arguing that the game convinced the killer to kill that resembles Jack Thompson. Another had a kidnapping occur because a pedophile was turned on by the avatar of a player in a Second Life expy. On one of the rare occasions games didn't kill someone, a mentally-ill mother neglected her daughter and let a pedophile abuse her because she was too obsessed with a fantasy video game.
• New York Is Only Manhattan: Averted here, while this show focuses on Manhattan, the other boroughs are routinely mentioned and/or visited.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In the cases Olivia personally involves herself in, she sometimes unintentionally makes things worse for the victims (See Strawman Ball).
  • "Wrath" has an innocent man Olivia had arrested and provided the key testimony against (she had been acting in good faith and following procedure) go around killing her other "victims" (the family members of victims she was unable to help and the like), obsessed with making her believe it was all her fault. The other detectives tell her to just ignore the guy and that he was completely off base by blaming her, but she can't see it as being that simple, and eventually chooses to accept that her actions indirectly contributed to these deaths, but that that doesn't mean she's responsible for them.
  • "Alien" from season 7 has the grandparents of a girl being raised by lesbian parents claim that the non-birth mother is molesting her because they were convinced by a religious conservative so they could get custody. After Olivia and Elliot show her how the huckster lied to them, they go apologize. But the other mother is so offended by the implication and accusation that she tells them they will never see their granddaughter again.
  • The episode, "Rescue," is also pretty bad in this case to the point that the constant exclamations that Olivia makes everything worse manage to ring true to the viewer. Stabler calls out Benson for not wanting to find Calvin's mother, a rape victim in the case, for fear of losing custody of Calvin. Benson finds Vivian, the mother, high on drugs and arrests her anyway after Cragen told Benson and Stabler to not get involved. They also get a confession before Cragen calls them both out for their disobeying him. Vivian admits to trying to protect her best friend, Sarah, after Sarah comes in and confesses she is really the killer. Sarah and Vivian indeed make bail, only for Sarah to get shot in the head in the garage. Finally the ex-boyfriend of Vivian gets arrested for the murder and Vivian court orders Benson to give up legal guardianship to her ex-husband's grandparents in Vermont while she goes into rehab, the whole time Benson trying to defy the court order and proclaim that Vivian's an unfit mother and basically shouldn't get her son back. So a quick recap: Vivian is high on drugs. She sees her best friend get murdered, her ex-boyfriend get arrested for the murder, Olivia accuse her of being an unfit mother after she put Calvin in Olivia's care because Vivian knew she couldn't raise Calvin, and finally is going to rehab while poor Calvin gets shuttled off to Vermont, an innocent victim whom Olivia has now lost custody of. Nice job, Olivia.
  • In the episode "Anchor", ADA Cabot was questioning, in court, the Bill O'Reilly Expy the defendant claimed had brainwashed him into killing illegal aliens. After obtaining the witness' testimony that he would never incite violence, Cabot then proceeds to bait him for absolutely no reason at all. The witness then proceeds to demand that his followers stop Cabot, inciting a riot in the courtroom, proving the defendant's case, and costing Cabot what would otherwise have been a slam dunk conviction. She is never called on this.
    • That wasn't an accidental case of this, though - she pretty obviously thought there were bigger fish to fry. In her mind, it was akin to letting a low-level thug off the hook in order to bring down the Don.
    • From the same episode, this is what the defendant's own defense lawyer comes to think of himself. Because once his client gets off due to ADA Cabot, he reveals to him that he enjoys killing colored migrant children, and he intends to go right back to doing it. So his defense lawyer shoots him.
  • And the time that Cragen found a child that had been missing for years in a case that had always grated him. Turns out said kid was in a perfectly loving foster family only to be taken away from them once his biological father is discovered.
    • Although the ending does show the father talking with the boy's foster parents, with the implication that he just gained a set of step-parents.
    • This was one of those cases that didn't have an easy answer. There was a murder to pursue and a legitimately missing child whose family still loved and missed him terribly, and all of the prospective guardians (the boy's father, his grandparents, and the adoptive parents) were completely innocent in the case. No matter what, somebody was going to get hurt.
  • In a case of this not being the fault of our heroes, Professor Dillon from season 16's "Devastating Story": when a girl comes to her with a legitimate case of being raped and ignored by the principal of Hudson University, she coaxes the victim into not only taking her story to public forums, but also exaggerating it by claiming that she was deliberately gang-raped, hoping to use it to drum up media attention on the subject of campus rape. Instead, her efforts result in the dismissal of the case when the fabricated elements of the story are inevitably discovered and the whole story is pulled apart, which means that not only does the victim's actual rapist get off scot-free, she's caused enormous damage to her cause by associating it with this fake rape story scandal. It's even lampshaded by Olivia Benson, who sadly notes that Dillon's ploy has basically set the fight against rape culture back by 30 years.
• No Bisexuals:
  • Averted in "Sacrifice", when the man who had been shot outside of a gay bar in the beginning of the episode was later revealed to have a wife and daughter. The detectives assured him plenty of people "hit for both teams". Though ultimately subverted in that he wasn't bisexual, he was actually straight and being paid to do gay porn in order to pay for his daughter's medical treatment.
  • In one episode, a serial rapist of women is found to be living with another man as a gay couple. The cops all decide that he must just be using the rapes as a power-trip, not for the sex. At least they averted Depraved Bisexual... (this time).
  • "Lowdown" is far, far more painful than this one and is all about a group of black men who have sex with each other on the side behind their wives' back. Despite that premise, not once is the idea of bisexuality brought up, even in passing, and any mention of the possibility of sex with men leads to the cast (particularly Elliot) to downright state that only gays are capable of it. This episode was based on the real life phenomenon of being "on the down low" in the African-American community, and people on the down-low likewise rarely admit to being anything but 100% straight.
  • 11x13, "P.C.", finally averted the trope. It wasn't handled too well. More specifically, a very militant lesbian activist (she only cares about lesbian rights) came out as bi to save her boyfriend from being crucified as the perp of the week. When she announces it, most of the lesbians at the meeting act like she betrayed them. While there are both gay and straight people who, unfortunately, believe wholeheartedly in this trope, they're generally not so...melodramatic.
• Noble Demon: "Confession" features a man who is mockingly referred to as a "good pedophile": he runs a website featuring tame pictures of young children for other pedophiles to enjoy without actually going out and harming one, strictly enforcing its "look but don't touch" rule, reasoning that it keeps real children safe. He's also rather nonchalant about his predilections. He is arrested at the end of the episode for murdering a website subscriber after he admitted to violating the "Look but don't touch" rule.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Occasionally there are characters based on real-life celebrities such as the Michael Jackson and Jack McClellan stand-ins in "Sick" and "Confession" respectively.
  • Actually lampshaded with Caleb Bryant.
  • Missi Pyle once played an anti-vaxxer who totally isn't Jenny McCarthy.
• No Ending: The episode featuring Billy Campbell as an art professor accused of raping his student. We never find out whether he was found guilty or not.
• No Periods, Period:
  • Averted in one episode. A serial rapist kept track of his numerous victims' menstrual cycles because his entire intention was to impregnate them.
  • Another episode had a Stalker with a Crush (sorta) acquit herself when her blood was found at a crime scene: She and the victim's husband were about to have sex, but her period came. And she kept the sheets.
  • Referenced in another episode where a teenage gymnast apparently thinks this should be the case, viewing the onset of her period as a sign she's not training hard enough. Sadly, the existance of this mindset in the gymnastics community was Truth in Television for the time (and although it's thankfully become much rarer, there are still a few coaches^note like former Olympic coach Maggie Haney who buy into this).
• No Warrant? No Problem!: In one episode in particular, Benson and Stabler go to the suspect's apartment to question him and hear him having consensual sex with his girlfriend. They break down the door, and Stabler smirkingly claims that they had exigent circumstances because they heard a woman moaning.
• Noodle Incident: In "Manipulated," Fin tells Olivia, "Please don't get him [Munch] started on Dick Cheney again!", with Olivia clearly trying to avoid laughing.
• Not Proven: From time to time.
• Not His Blood: In one episode, the SVU breaks up a sex slavery ring in New York City, ending with a raid on one of the brothels and a Shoot the Hostage Taker resolution, causing the hostage to be hit with the criminal's blood. The hostage, a teenage girl, is escorted out of the house where her aunt is waiting for her. Stabler assures the aunt that the blood isn't the girl's.
  • In the Cold Open of "Zebras", a man falls into a bush while roller-skating with his daughter and comes out with blood on his head. His daughter examimes him and can't find an injury, so they look in the bushes and realize he fell on the blood-covered body of the Victim of the Week.
• "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization: A bunch of rapists try to use this as a defense (specifically the arousal/orgasm variation). One gang member that participated in the gang rape of a new member's girlfriend uses this to try and bring doubt on her testimony, and his own bitch of a girlfriend uses the same sort of "logic". However, it is definitely not portrayed as okay.
  • In "Parole Violations", Carisi's sister has a hard time believing that her fiance could have penetrated a woman unless he was into it, but Olivia explains the biological basis behind it, comparing it to tearing up while cutting onions.
  • "Ridicule" has a defense attorney try this in court, arguing that because the male rape victim got an erection, the female rapists had implied consent.
• Not Me This Time:
  • BX9 is a notorious gang of thugs who have landed themselves in SVU's crosshairs multiple times for gang-rape, assault, murder, hate crimes, and more. In "Manhattan Transfer", they are suspected of running a sex trafficking ring, but it turns out they are being framed by someone else.
  • In "Web", when a young boy has been molested, suspicion is immediately cast on his father, who is on parole for having molested his older son, but has weekly supervised visits with his younger son. It wasn't him—it was the older son.
  • In "Night", the detectives immediately suspect that Gabriel Duval, the main suspect in a series of rapes, is responsible for beating Casey nearly to death in her office. While evidence eventually does prove Duval was the rapist, he really didn't have anything to do with Casey's beating; it turns out her attacker was the brother of one of the victims, who was mad at Casey for getting his sister involved because now everyone would know she was raped and wasn't a virgin.
• Not What It Looks Like: Or what is sounds like in the episode "Sugar", where the only clue the detectives have to the identity of a witness is an online alias.
  Stabler: *over a store's PA* "Will the 'Master Baiter', please report to register 1? 'Master Baiter', register 1?"
  A homely looking nerd starts walking towards the register.
  Benson: *over the PA* "Not a masturbator, the ' Master Baiter '!"

O - P

• Obfuscating Disability: "Manipulated" had a woman who had long since made a full recovery from an accident keeping her wheelchair and making herself sick for the sympathy and to control her husband, who she was framing for a couple murders - it's revealed when he shoves her wheelchair into a pool. Just to double up on the trope, she may have been faking the Munchausen's Syndrome as a defense.
• Odd Friendship: Olivia and a defense attorney (she's pointed several clients including her half-brother his way). Their friendship is especially odd since they first met when he decimates a rape case and gets the defendant acquitted even though the audience saw him do it. It's also rather inconvenient since they both do everything they can for justice, and in the attorney's case that includes threatening to reveal Olivia's romantic relationship with the ADA.
  • Olivia and Tucker probably qualifies too, given how antagonistic they were in the early seasons.
• Off on a Technicality: Going this route is a bad idea, since the show adores some Vigilante Justice. (It generally means you've traded jail time for being shot in the head shortly after leaving the police station.)
• Offing the Offspring: "Raw" centers around a shooting at an elementary school that kills one child and injures two others. The boy who was killed had recently been adopted; his parents thought they were saving him from the messy foster care system. Ends up subverted in this case; the parents adopted the boy specifically so that they could have him killed for the insurance money.
• Oh, Crap!: In "Transgender Bridge", the reaction of the bullies when the transgender kid they were bullying fell off the bridge as a result of their altercation.
• One-Word Title: Extremely well-loved by this series for episode titles. The fifth episode of Season 4 is entitled "Disappearing Acts". This is the last multi-word episode title the series would have until the Season 13 premiere. And it didn't even start there — "Disappearing Acts" itself followed a two-season streak of one-word titles. (However, once they started using them again, multi-word titles quickly became the norm, with only a handful of episodes in the later seasons playing this trope straight.)
• Once for Yes, Twice for No: Subverted in an episode with a brain-dead patient; they set things up to look like this in order to engineer a Bluffing the Murderer moment.
  • Played straight at a number of points in an episode with MS patients.
• Older Than They Look:
  • Invoked in "Pretend," which involves a 16-year-old high school student who turns out to be a 28-year-old woman who's been posing as a teen for ten years in order to scam the foster-care system.
  • An episode involves a 17 year old girl with the body of a 10 year old going out with an older man. The officers try to bust the man, but the girl was legal and consenting.
  • A Season 10 episode features a cop who is undercover as a student in the same college as Elliot's (second) daughter.
  • The victim in "Pixies" was 19 but passing for 16, and the detectives and the ME originally estimated her age as even younger. Truth in Television to an extent since the victim was a gymnast, and at the time, being small and prepubescent was considered the ideal body in women's gymnastics, to the point where girls would take extreme measures to retain that body type as long as possible. (Thankfully, that's largely changed since then.)
• Old Man Marrying a Child: The episode "Charisma" involved this. The marriage is not legally binding, but it's treated as a real marriage by the cultists.
• Old Shame:invoked Elizabeth Donnelly. As seen in "Persona," her run-in with the Idiot Ball that resulted in a murderer escaping from jail coined the phrase "doing a Donnelly" for several years after.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten:
  • A social worker in "Careless" is called to trial for placing a child in an abusive home, which eventually led to his death. The bad publicity and death threats she receives drive her to suicide, with her last words lampshading that she has saved hundreds of children but will only be remembered for this one.
  • Elliot Stabler once admitted that he has fantasies of murdering child molesters, which is often brought up by people who question his credibility as a cop.
• Online Alias: The season 11 episode "Sugar" has a woman who goes by "The Master Baiter" online (she obscures her face and distorts her voice when she films her videos).
  • "October Surprise," based on Anthony Weiner's adventures as Carlos Danger, gives us Enrique Trouble.
  • "Avatar" features two women who use "Tawny Coppercuffs" and "Vixy Platinum" as their usernames on the Second Life Expy "Another Youniverse."
• Only Sane Man: Criminal profiler and FBI Special Agent Dr. George Huang often fills this role pointing out things like sexuality is complicated and a person can be attracted to both men and women in "Lowdown" while every one else believes that there are No Bisexuals. Or pointing out in "Clock" that sleeping with some one of legal age that is Older Than They Look is not a crime. Unfortunately they usually do not listen to his (professional and usually well-informed) opinion.
  • John Munch is occasionally this, when he actually has lines. He tended to be the naysayer of the squad who questioned the others' groupthink and advocated alternative viewpoints but after his departure this role sadly disappeared.
  • Rafael Barba inherited this role from Huang after he left.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Irish actor Stephen Rea, known for playing Inspector Finch in V for Vendetta, guest stars in the episode "Solitary", and once in a while you'll hear a touch of UK in his speech. Listen to the way he says "years" when he's testifying about being in solitary confinement.
  • Possibly justified: his character states that his family moved into his current apartment "fresh off the boat" when he was ten years old, implying that he is an immigrant.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: In S 10 Ep 20, "Crush", an interviewee mentions a boxing class.
  "But no one's supposed to know about that."
• Opposites Attract: Fin is a somewhat staunch Republican. Munch is a left-leaning Conspiracy Theorist. Both are as thick as thieves.
• Oppressive Immigration Enforcement: "Zero Tolerance" tackles the Trump Administration's Family Separation policy, with the children of migrants being separated from their families at the border and transported to detention centres. This leads to pre-pubescent Gabriela arriving in New York, circumstances conspiring to lead to her falling into a child sex trafficking ring. The detention centre itself is presented as outright dystopian with dozens of children locked behind chain link caging away from their families, sleeping on concret floors with only thin mats and metallic emergency blankets for bedding. The Office of Refugee Resettlement officer Jeff Phelps overseeing Gabriela is likewise presented as a smug, smarmy man who is utterly apathetic to moral concerns of his actions, dismissing them as simply following the policy at the time.
• Or Are You Just Happy to See Me?: The RDK copycat in "Scavenger" gives Elliot a variant:
  RDK: Why detective, is that your phone vibrating or do you just find me terribly exciting?
• Order vs. Chaos: "Obscene" featured a stringent Moral Guardian campaigning against scantily-clad girls in movies and television vs. a bombastic radio talk show host and die-hard advocate of free speech rights.
• Out-of-Character Alert: In "Townhouse Incident," while being held hostage, Olivia texts a nonsense response to her sitter that includes a reference to William Lewis (who had held her hostage and attempted to rape her in a prior episode). The sitter doesn't know the name "William Lewis", but the message makes no sense to her (particularly because Olivia called her son by the wrong name), so she realizes that it means something is amiss and takes it over to the SVU office.
  Carisi: Guys, we got a problem here. Liv just texted this to her babysitter.
  Tutuola: "Stuck at precinct all day. Pick up William at daycare. He has a playdate with Lewis today."
  Barba: William Lewis? That's not good.
• Out of Focus: Munch. By the time he retired, he was barely appearing enough for it to be noticeable or meaningful.
• Out with a Bang: WAY too many times to count, but considering the fact that it's the main characters' job to investigate sex crimes, it's a Justified Trope.
  • Sometimes subverted by the show. A notable Double Subversion happens in one episode that begins with a couple having an extra-marital affair and the married partner of one arriving. The other flees through a window and discovers the actual Victim of the Week, who is dead in the apartment below. Then it's discovered that she wasn't raped, but that she was staged like the victims of a 1970s serial killer / rapist that is still at large.
• Papa Wolf: Between Elliot and Fin... A special mention has to be given to "Venom", when they go head-to-head. Fin gets angry when Elliot interrogates his son, and responds by bringing up Kathleen's drunk driving. The two of them need to be pulled off of each other.
  • Elliot was also rather protective of Olivia, as a couple of times he bit Munch's head off for thoughtlessly bringing up Olivia's past.
  • Heartbreakingly subverted in season 5 episode "Abomination" where a father claims to have killed his son's male lover because he was unaware his son was gay and thought he was being sexually assaulted by another man. In the end, it is revealed that the young man's father knew he was gay all along and only killed his lover out of spite because his son's homosexuality would destroy his career as a homosexual conversion therapist.
  • Played straight in another episode with similar themes. An evangelical reverend is willing to be implicated for murder and painted as gay (with the latter being as bad as the former in the eyes of their religion) because he believes that his son, the victim's real lover, was responsible, and the father, who had recently lost a son in Iraq, couldn't bear to lose another child. He only gives up the charade when he realizes his son didn't do it either. And just to put the icing on the cake, the reverend also tells his son that he accepts him being gay.
• Parental Betrayal: In the season three episode "Justice," the wife of a prominent judge kills her teen daughter in a fit of rage after the girl confessed to her that her beloved husband raped and impregnated her when she was eleven. When Benson and Stabler come to arrest her, they are horrified when the woman shrugs off the rape by claiming that it was her daughter who seduced her husband and then self-righteously exclaim that her dying daughter looked at her as if she (the mother) was the one who betrayed her.
• Parental Savings Splurge: "Vulnerable" sees the detectives investigate the case of an elderly woman who was tortured and forced to sign cheques. They interrogate her son, who immediately points the finger at her grandson (his own son), who he describes as a deadbeat who dropped out of uni. When they interrogate the grandson, he explains that the only reason he dropped out was because his dad frittered away his college funds on bad business ideas, and he considers his grandma the only relative who cared about him.
• Pater Familicide: "Annihilated".
• Patched Together from the Headlines: Many.
  • For most of "Pure", it's an adaptation of The Karla Homolka/Paul Bernardo case, before its Twist Ending reveals that it was also ripped from the headlines of the Bobbie Jo Stinnett murder, who was murdered and had her baby cut out. The baby survived.
  • "Selfish" starts off being an episode about an irresponsible young mother who is reported for a "trunk that smells like death" by her own mother after her daughter goes missing, like the 2008 death of Caylee Anthony. It then ends up being about whether or not people have the right to refuse to vaccinate their children.
  • "Alternate" begins as a Gender Flip of the Billy Milligan rapes before it's revealed that it's also ripped from the headlines of the Menendez brother murders, in which two brothers killed their allegedly violent and sexually abusive parents.
  • "Babes" begins as a take on the 2014 "pregnancy pact" before it's revealed to actually be based on the suicide of Megan Meier.
  • "Intimidation Game" has a plot drawn from both the "GamerGate" controversy and the Isla Vista shootings. The episode title is also a play on The Imitation Game, despite that film having nothing to do with the episode.
  • 'American Tragedy' combines the racism scandal of Paula Deen in 2013 with the 2012 Trayvon Martin shooting.
• Pedophile Priest: There was an episode about this, of course ("Silence"). The priest himself was a far more sympathetic character than you might expect ^note though he was accused, he had never abused anyone, only fantasized about it. In the episode's final scene, he redeems himself by agreeing to testify against the real villain, the bishop, even though it means he'll lose everything.
  • Double subverted in "Presumed Guilty". A guy was arrested for beating up a priest, who he thought had molested his teenage sister, after seeing said priest hugging a little girl. Turned out the priest didn't molest anyone and the girl in question was his daughter, a fact that he and her mother kept secret due to his vows. However his attacker's sister was indeed molested by a priest, just a different one (she never told her brother the name of her attacker, so he tried to deduce who it was but got it wrong).
  • In "Manhattan Transfer"/"Unholiest Alliance", the priests are actively involved in the sex trafficking of underage girls.
• Perp Walk: You can almost guess what comes next based on how many minutes into the show a suspect is being led away in cuffs.
• Phony Psychic: Martin Short's guest appearance.
• Pillow Silencer: The episode "Ghost" has the criminal of the week named Ghost attempt to kill a six year old boy by shooting him through a pillow.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Benson & Stabler
• Poe's Law: "Raw" has Stabler and Munch trace a murder weapon to a gun shop that turns out to also be the base for a white supremacist group. Of the three workers/members seen during their visit, the most obviously racist of the group turns out to actually be an undercover FBI agent.
• Police Are Useless: Used in "Lost Traveller" as the families involved in the episode do not trust the detectives (or the NYPD) at all. It gets to the point where the victim's mother turns into a Vigilante Man because she feels the detectives haven't served justice yet.^note They're trying to build their case on the supposed suspect, but they're moving too slow for her tastes and when she's tipped off on his identity, she strikes.
• Police Lineup: Several times per season. But by no means once an episode like you'd expect.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Given the nature of the crimes SVU investigates, they encounter many, many perps who fall under this category. For example by subscribing to a gendered Double Standard, regarding some victims as people "no one will miss," or choosing their victims based on homophobic, racist, ethnic, or other forms of bigotry. It's also not uncommon for lesser villains to reveal themselves as jerkasses by making casually sexist or racist comments to the detectives.
• Precision F-Strike: Season 25's "Combat Fatigue" has Fin snarl "asshole" to a Hate Sink pedophile who's been going out of his way to antagonize the victim and her family - considering the strict censorship laws in the United States, this is a ballsy move for the script writers and shows how repugnant the criminal is.
• Pregnancy Does Not Work That Way: In an in-universe case, one episode has a defendant in a rape case mount a defense based on the idea that women can't get pregnant from rape, and therefore, since his victim is pregnant, it proves that it was consensual sex. The main characters know it's complete nonsense (especially given that one of the protagonists is actually a Child by Rape), but the defendant spins the story well enough to deadlock the jury.
• Pregnant Hostage: In "Tragedy", Detectives Benson and Stabler try to find a kidnapped woman with a high-risk pregnancy.
• Prison: Every once in a while, one of the detectives must go to a prison and interview a convict in order to catch a perp.
• Prison Changes People: A bit character on one episode was a death row inmate who converted to Islam while in prison and wished to atone.
• Prison Rape: The detectives' favorite threat comes back to bite the SVU in the ass at least twice: The first time was when a pair of serial rapists was attacking men in Central Park while Olivia was distracted by her new-found half-brother Simon they got them to confess by threatening to reveal what happened to them in prison in a presidential investigation; the second was when a perp was raped in prison after Olivia threatened him with it, and deduced that Olivia had sent the man to rape him. Didn't stop Cabot from using the threat a week later.
  • Nearly happens to Olivia in "Undercover", at the hands of a rapist prison guard. Fin shows up to help in the nick of time.
  • Also happens in "Fallacy", an episode featuring a pre-op transgender woman, after she loses a fight to be housed in a women's prison and then retracts the deal she previously made with the ADA only to be convicted and sent back to the men's prison anyway.
  • Another notable one was the guy at the hotel party in "Taken". As usual, when there's one guy who's just gotta be the perp, he turns out not to be. To add the final Butt Monkey touch, he ends up prison-raped to death in Rikers before he can be released.
• Promotion to Opening Titles: Michelle Hurd (Monique Jeffries) halfway through Season 1; Stephanie March (Alex Cabot) and Ice-T (Fin Tutuola) the episode after their introduction in Season 2; B.D. Wong (George Huang) in Season 4 after being a Recurring Character since Season 2; Tamara Tunie (Melnda Warner) in Season 7 after being a Recurring Character since Season 2; Adam Beach (Chester Lake) in Season 9 after a two-episode guest appearance the previous season; Stephanie March gets promoted back in Season 11 after returning as a Recurring Character the previous season; Raúl Esparza (Rafael Barba) in Season 15 after being a Recurring Character the previous Season; Peter Scanavino (Sonny Carisi) in the episode following his introduction during Season 16; Philip Winchester (Peter Stone) in the episode following his introduction in Season 19.
• Promotion to Parent: Sort of: In "Savior" A newly-ex-prostitute gives Olivia power of attorney over her very premature, very ill infant daughter while she (the ex-prostitute) gets her life to a point where she can be a good mother (at least, that's what she said). Earlier, Olivia tells Elliot that she would rather stop caring for the infant because there's no chance she'll have a normal, healthy life (Elliot disagrees and accuses her of coming to that decision because she's not a parent); the episode has a No Ending when the baby needs emergency surgery, and Liv is forced to decide whether to allow an operation which could leave the kid brain-damaged or let her die, and since the baby hasn't been mentioned since...
  • Word of God says (on Twitter) that the baby died. Uh...good to know.
  • Happens again to Olivia, who is now legal guardian to her not-half-sister's teenage son Calvin Arliss after she killed her mother's rapist/biological father and fled. The boy was happily living with Olivia (who was dragging her feet trying to find his bio-dad) until not-sister, now high as a kite and living with her enabling drug-addict girlfriend, returned for custody. (here's where things get a bit fuzzy) Not-sister was arrested but then her girlfriend revealed that she killed the rapist, and then the kid's bio-dad, who was desperately looking for his son and had had a room ready for years, killed his ex-wife's girlfriend because he blamed her for getting his wife addicted to drugs. So not-sister's in prison, bio-dad's in prison, and the boy is with bio-dad's parents.
  • She finally gets one for good beginning in the Season 15 finale, when she's given custody of a child she had rescued during an earlier investigation. It briefly looks to be in jeopardy, with the child's biological father attempting to assert a claim, but he is killed in a courtroom shootout and with both parents now dead, Olivia is approved to adopt the child.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: The show could very well be the poster child for this trope. Anything the detectives do, regardless of how morally or ethically questionable it is, is always depicted as being in the right while anyone who opposes or even calls them out on it is always in the wrong. Especially if the one calling them out is Internal Affairs or a defense attorney.
• Psycho Lesbian: In "P.C." When a lesbian is murdered, the unit believes that a rapist who targets lesbians may be responsible. It turns out that her girlfriend had serious anger issues and a history of abusing her partners. Somewhat of a subversion (?) the girlfriend had indeed been abusive, but she was in therapy, and the culprit was a male rapist targeting lesbians.
• Psychopathic Man Child: Stuckey... or something.
• Put Down Your Gun and Step Away: Almost Once per Episode.
• Punny Name:
  • Casey Novak, the main Assistant District Attorney from Seasons 5-9 (plus a few episodes from 12-13).
  • "Babes" featured a Catholic schoolgirl named Fidelia who cheated on her boyfriend.
• Put on a Bus:
  • Alex Cabot. She got better... or rather her would-be killers got worse. She voluntarily went back on the bus after a witness told her about the horrific rapes in Africa and joined an NGO to prosecute the rapists for crimes against humanity. She came back after the summer.
  • Casey is suspended from practice after Season 9, but appears sporadically in Season 13.
  • Starting on Season 13, Elliot Stabler. He took early retirement but from Olivia and Cragen's reactions you'd have thought he Ate His Gun like his father. It took him a full decade to make a reappearance.
  • Dr. Huang as well. No explanation was given for almost a year, until The Bus Came Back in "Father Dearest", and he mentioned that he had been reassigned to... Oklahoma.
  • As of season 15, Munch and Cragen have both retired though that doesn't stop them from coming back on occasion.
  • As of the end of Season 16, Amaro has moved to California to raise his family.

---