By Matthew Russell Lee
www.innercitypress.com/drc1svu031810.html
UNITED NATIONS, March 18 -- The plight of women in the Eastern Congo made it into the second half of an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on St. Patrick's night. A home health attendant who intervenes to stop a rape in the stairwell of a New York apartment building by punching the rapist in the face. Due to her (over the top) accent, the rapist plays the undocumented alien card, threatening to have her deported if she testifies against him.
But the crack SVU squad track her down and offer to protect her against deportation, as a material witness in what turns out to be a murder case. Interviewed by outgoing prosecutor Ms. Cabot, it emerges that the witness was repeatedly raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Here the SVU writers insert that rape and fear of mass rape is not a basis for an asylum claim in the United States. Next, immigration agents take the witness into custody, then ship her to a (private) immigration detention center in New York.
The indefatigable Jack McCoy, now moonlighting as a pitchman for TD Ameritrade, gets the U.S. Attorney involved, and the witness is released. On the stand, she is asked if she is not a terrorist, married to a terrorism -- that is, the forced wife of the FDLR Interahamwe.
Hey, snarked on close Congo watcher, Bosco and Nkunda's CNDP never made it into SVU!
The U.S.-based Enough Project sent out a press release about the show, and some surmise that they were consultants. While integrating serious material into a U.S. detective show is commendable, one wonders about the lack of any reference to rape by government forces in the Congo, or even sexual exploitation by UN peacekeepers. Such are the down sides of using a single NGO as consultant.
The show ends in a frenzy of good feeling. The witness is offered a U visa to stay in the United States, but chooses to return to the Congo to empower other women. Ms. Cabot is again leaving the Empire of Wolf's Law & Order franchise, ostensibly heading to the International Criminal Court to prosecute rape as a weapon of war.
A previously Law & Order, which wove children and armed conflict into the plot about Uganda, also referred to the ICC. Two references to the ICC in the most long term popular crime drama franchise in a country that has not joined the ICC's Rome Statute: do we smell activist media industry?
Or is it just a single SVU staffer with an ICC fixation? We will endeavor to find out. The show's worth seeing, and will live forever in reruns, as there is a Law & Order playing at all hours of the day, even in Kinshasa and Goma.
