Law Order Special Victims Unit Seasons

"In the season 21 episode, “The Darkest Journey Home,” the survivor tells Olivia everything she remembers, which is that she went to a bar, took a car home, and nothing else. When the survivor says that she drank a lot and took a Xanax, Olivia says: “Well, you know what? None of that matters. None of it.” Then Olivia begins the trauma-informed interview: “What, if anything, can you tell me about what you heard? What you saw?” The episode then cuts to flashes of bright lights on a ceiling, illustrating the disjointed memory from the survivor’s perspective. When she says she remembers water, Olivia responds: “So tell me about water,” leading to a longer point-of-view flashback of the ceiling, with silhouettes of male hands over the camera and the sounds of waves crashing and the survivor struggling. The motion of the camera in this flashback is chaotic, evoking the sense of fear and confusion the survivor must have felt when she experienced it. The flashbacks focus entirely on the survivor’s perspective, by staying locked in her visual and aural subjectivity through the use of her POV and the sounds she describes having heard. This method is effective at sensitively portraying an assault because “representing a rape scene from a woman’s point of view...may be the most explicit way to incorporate a woman’s perspective on rape” (Projansky: Watching Rape,153). The portrayal of rape in this episode is incredibly sensitive to the survivor it is portraying and survivors who may be watching, because “graphic depictions of trauma can vicariously traumatize certain viewers” (Spallacci, 6)."