Written By Paul Grellong
Directed By Peter Leto
Eight-year-old Jake Winnock propositions a male classmate and detectives soon learn that his father had previously spent seven years in prison for molesting Jake's older brother Teddy. However, DNA tests clear Gregory Hensal of abusing his son, but instead implicate Teddy, who has been running his own personal Internet pornography site under his mother's nose and using it to sell videos of him molesting his brother to other pedophiles.
Tropes
- A Day in the Limelight: A minor one for T.A.R.U. Technician Ruben Morales. After defying an order from Cragen to shut down Teddy's child porn website, he becomes more emotionally invested in the case than usual. He tells Stabler how his young nephew was molested by an online pedophile, and Morales feels guilty because he bought and set up his nephew's computer.
- Big Brother Bully: Teddy is first seen pushing his little brother Jake away from a video game, and flat-out says to Stabler that he doesn't care if Jake gets molested by their father, who once did the same to him. It is later revealed that Teddy had been molesting Jake, as well as making child porn videos of him and selling them to pedophiles through his personal website.
- The Chain of Harm: Teddy was molested by his father, and then years later did the same things to his younger brother.
- Corrupting Pornography: The teenage Teddy was already traumatized by being sexually abused by his father. But he also met child pornography viewers online, and they groomed him and paid him to upload videos of him molesting his younger brother, ensuring that the abuse continued.
- 555: Benson, working at the Computer Crime Unit, traces the IP addresses of two of the customers at Teddy's site. All the addresses shown start with numbers in the thousands. A burner phone one of them used starts with 555.
- Instant Sedation: When Teddy gets kidnapped by one of his pornography site clients, he's drugged with chloroform. He struggles for only a few seconds before he's out cold.
- Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Morales tries this on Lucas.
- Like Father, Like Son: Teddy is a sexual predator like his father. Fin even Lampshades it.
- Mood Whiplash: In the teaser, a woman from an abuse-prevention organization is shown having a light-hearted conversation with a kid about why they shouldn't rub boogers on their sister, complete with using her hand puppet for emphasis. Then she calls up the next kid... who tells her that his friend (Jake) had been talking about "rubbing weenies". You can see the woman's entire demeanor visibly shift as she realizes she's now dealing with something extremely serious.
- Not Me This Time: When Jake is revealed to have been molested, suspicion is immediately cast on his father, who was jailed for having molested his older son Teddy, but has been released and has weekly supervised visits with his younger son. Turns out it was Teddy.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: SVU is tipped off to a problem after a young child reveals that one of his classmates has been talking about sexual acts. As with many cases of this type, the main concern isn't with Jake's behavior in and of itself, but the fact that what he did is a potential red flag of a child being sexually abused (which in this case turns out to be accurate).
- Teddy himself is much more serious example, as he's not only selling himself via cam shows but also abusing his younger brother as part of the show. While he too is acting out as a result of abuse, his behavior, unlike Jake's, is far too serious to overlook. At the end of the episode, he finally admits that he's not okay and needs help.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: According to his mother, Teddy used to be a happy, normal boy before he was molested by his father, after which he became sullen and withdrawn, spending all his time in his room playing computer games and refusing to eat dinner at the table with the rest of the family. And then it's revealed that he was not only molesting his kid brother, but making pornographic videos of him to sell to pedophiles online.
-
You Look Familiar: Guest star Connor Paolo (Teddy) had previously appeared in season 4's "Juvenile", as Zachary Connor.
